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Search - "life/career"
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I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.
I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.
Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.
His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.
We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.
This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.
I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.
Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.
He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.21 -
Worst dev I've interviewed?
"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).
Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."
Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"
Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.
The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")
After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."
Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."
After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).23 -
We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.
When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.
A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.
I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.
When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.
I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.
After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).
OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.
I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.
Computers helped me through a tough childhood.
They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.
I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...
But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.22 -
The everyday software development process:
I can’t fix this!
Crisis of confidence 😕
Questions career 😳
Questions life 😩
...oh it was a typo, cool 😆 🙌3 -
Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..
Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.
In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.
For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.
We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.
It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.
😅4 -
Whoever decided to put a "No to all" button in Notepad++, I wish you and your family a healthy and wealthy life. I hope you will get a pay rise and be successful in your career.
- Windows OS user after a long while. Closing a lot of files was a nightmare back then.17 -
You what's been pissing me off this week. The press and social media coverage of this Google guy's gender memo.
Almost every outlet has him saying:
"Women are inferior coders because of their biology"
He ABSOLUTELY does not say this anywhere. He only states that basically less women are attracted to the industry. He doesn't comment at all on the quality of the Women who do go into tech.
It astonishes me the utter ignorance of the media and how they can just print these ignorant errors / lies.
I would wager that most if not all of them never even read his memo.
I am really fucked off by this social media keyboard warrior driven world we live in.
Apparently we value freedom of speech and freedom of expression above all else... UNLESS you say something that pisses off the social media justice warriors. In that case you will be publicly crucified and your life / career will be destroyed.
The annoying thing is in this particular case he didn't even say what they are saying he did.43 -
The main reason I'll stick to development as a career for the rest of my life is the freedom.
I can have a 3 hour long lunch with my girlfriend, I can write code at 2am, and usually I can leave for short holidays with just a few days notice.
That freedom is saving the little bits of social life I have.10 -
Me everyday:
1- Get excited to start coding
2- Start coding
3- Run code
4- Bug found
5- Start debugging
6- Start feeling frustrating
7- Start questioning myself about career
8- Start hating life
9- Start banging head against the wall
10- Start looking for a different job
11- Oh shit! It was a typo
12- Go back to number 16 -
It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.
It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.
The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.
I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.
Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.
I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.
And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."
It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.
I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.
If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.7 -
Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.
After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.
Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).
Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.
I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.
The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.
I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.
I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.
The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).
Hey all! I’m new on devRant!12 -
Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..
Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:
Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?
Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..
Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.
Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..
Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.
Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.
Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..
Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***
WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?
Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...6 -
After working for about 3 years of my life I've established the following;
Work is mostly stupid people praising other stupid people about their stupid work, while clever people remain in the shadows. Will this be true for the rest of my career or am I just working at a company with a bad culture?5 -
"Kiki, I want you to, for the first time of your career at %company%, quit worrying about deadlines and just wander free. Forget about due projects, forget about everything, and just do your crazy experiments till the end of this month."
This was the one-to-one with our CEO today. Yes, I'm being paid to do whatever I want without time restrictions, as long as it is related to my field.
And you know what? At this stage of my life, I don't even want to exploit that, to weasel my way around definitions and justify doing nothing. I legit have three AI experiments to run, I have money to run them, I have time, and I for sure have motivation.
Good workplace is when doing nothing isn't the most desirable thing to do.6 -
Honestly? People. For the first two years of my career I worked for an investment bank.. Basically working to make rich people richer. That, plus the technology sucked, made me change what I do.
I now work for a company that, while it doesn't cure cancer, it makes products that my friends use, my family uses, even my 1 year old son uses. And knowing I am making a difference in their life in even just a little way is worth it.
Also now that I have a family and a kid, my priorities have shifted and as much as I love coding, my family and kid will always come first now. Could I be making more at an investment bank where I worked 12 hour shifts every day? Sure. But it's not worth it to me.3 -
FLOYD IS HERE 😎
Gather around kids, it's story time.
So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.
31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).
I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.
I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.
I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.
I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)
I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).
So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.
November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.
Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.
Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.
She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.
She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.
Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.
@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.
That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.
I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).
Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.
I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.
Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.
I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.
During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.
Continued in comments...61 -
The software development process
i can’t fix this
*crisis of confidence*
*questions career*
*questions life*
oh it was a typo, cool2 -
It's a shame devRant has gone to hell, but as the moderation seems to be non existent now in a time it's desperately needed, today I kill my ++ subscription.
This was the first community and probably the last I actually thought was worth investing in and making the most of, but it turns out I lost that gamble.
It's a shame really, this place used to be the absolute highlight of my day, you guys... and of course ladies, got me through a lot in life and a lot in my career and I'll appreciate the good times, but these days; well I don't even feel good about supporting this place, how the turns have tabled.
😕32 -
I switched to Comic Sans for any internal communication.
Those in delivery/support/sales/HR/emotional crap/professional buzzworders/etc no longer take me seriously and therefore I no longer waste my time with their BS.
If not an improvement in the more materialistic side of the career itself, certainly an improvement in the quality of life.3 -
College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.
I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.
This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.
Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.
Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.
The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.
Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.
Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.
And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.
And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!
But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.
My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.
If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.
Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.15 -
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".
I started a new job today (remote) and my first task was to improve product sign-up process, basically the UX is shit and the backend is even worse, never felt so bad looking at terrible software design my entire life and career. My first assignment was to introduce some sanity. (Mr. Supervisor's exact words)
Anyway, I report directly to upper management but need to get onboarded by current technology expert who's highly skilled at writing shitty code and is also stupid, literally.
It took the whole day to get him to grant access to the private repo in order to start working but that's not the story.
So, I'm seated, demoralised about the structure of software I have to work on and here I was refreshing localhost:7878 consistently and was consistently getting the message:
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".
So, this same codebase I have is suppose to be the exact same one that's powering the app in production. I was furious and confused. Is stupid calling me a bitch already??? He wants to fuck??? What the hell!!!
I called him and turns out, I was suppose to switch branches. The branch I had was suppose to show that message intentionally (??!???!???) (His words exactly), I couldn't even muster the words "Why" completely before he hung up.
So basically, I got onboarded today. Quite successfully, I must add, because I know exactly the battlesuit I have to wear to my new remote job going forward!11 -
I used to love my job.
Then I disliked my job.
The people I worked with kept me at my job.
When those people left all I had was my dislike.
Now I hate my job.
And I'm really starting to hate the people I work with.
I'm not even sure I even want to keep developing anymore, but at this point I couldn't support my family any other way.
So I'll stay smouldering for the next 40 years, in a career dumpster fire that's long lost its magic just so I can give my family a better life.12 -
!rant
Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).
I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.
In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.1 -
A little late, and similar to other lovely ladies on here, but the greatest influencer for me is my husband.
He's always pushed me to learn more and be a better, cleaner coder. He taught me continuous integration, introduced me to the Atom editor, and showed me that my nerdy interests and choice of career can actually be quite attractive and not "intimidating" or "inappropriate” for a woman.
He's my go-to hackathon partner, my strictest code reviewer, and my life long teacher.
Ich liebe dich, mein Schatzelein! 😍7 -
When I was a little boy my father who was an entrepreneur back then hired a computer programmer to develop some kind of administrative software for him. He was programming on the Commodore VIC20. I was very interested in what he was doing and he gave me some books about programming basic on the VIC20. I read them, started programming and I've been hooked ever since!
As I do still remember this man's name I searched on the internet now and then to see if I could find him. End of last year I found him on FB and wrote him a message to thank him for what he did back then. It's because of him that I found out what I love doing most and have a great working career and life because I do what I love to do and get paid very well for it.
Thanks, mr. Stomp!3 -
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
I'm so close to giving up. Yesterday, I travelled 4 hours in one direction for a job interview for a graduate position as a web developer. As I arrived at the interview, I was welcomed by a senior dev and one of the HR people.
I sit down and they start explaining how everything will commence(standard procedure stuff) and afterwards hand me the technical test. At this time I am super calm cause I did my homework, checked out their products, their websites and knew right away what I was going to work on. As I turn the page, I see at the top with huge fucking capital letters "JAVA OOP test".
I take a minute and look back at them, like wtf is happening. Turns out that they are looking for a java dev. They picked me for the role because I had literally 1 fucking sentence in my CV and where I have said that I studied java in one semester of uni. FYI my entire portfolio, cv and cover letter are focused on JS, html, css both for client and server side.
As the fucking HR guy stood there and asked me "is there something wrong", I felt broken inside. For the first time in my fucking life I felt like I was done and couldn't continue anymore. I felt like this is some bitch-slap from karma about something but I still can't figure out what. I just walked out of there being unable to realize what happened.
I just feel like I should end my developer career before it has even started, just go do business analysis or something. Why the fuck would someone put a job description entirely talking about Angular, Less/SASS, bootstrap and jQuery and then say that is a Java dev OOP role. Who the fuck allows those people to take good salaries yet still deliver the up most shittiest quality service.
Before the interview, I checked out their websites which are simply horrendous with the comparability of a fucking baked potato. Idk really what to do, I don't mean to sound as a whiny little b.... but as I walked out of their office, I felt broken inside. Sorry for the long rant.8 -
Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life
> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.12 -
Xpost from /r/sysadmin:
I occasionally see posts from people who seem like they want to spend every waking hour of every waking minute working on home lab stuff and studying for certs.
If you do this, you're missing out on life which you will regret later, but even if you don't care about missing out on life, it actually is hurting your career.
Being well rounded helps you interact with others at work in a number of ways. It makes you less one dimensional as "the computers guy" and it also gives you topics to discuss with people. If you know how to cook, or brew beer, or bake bread you end up using a lot of your technical and troubleshooting skills. Biking long distancing and learning how to fix your bike helps with your troubleshooting skills too. You learn to look at things from other angles.
Reading novels or writing poetry or making art work also helps because it exercises your brain. Woodworking or metal working involve a lot of skills that'd help your IT career including project planning and measuring and budgeting for each project. Working on cars or motorcycles would be similar. You just have to do SOMETHING.
I have a member of my team who literally has nothing going on in his life other than studying for certs. No friends, no hobbies, and he basically eats nothing but McDonalds and frozen dinners because even making a meal takes time away from his studying. He thinks means he's dedicated and will experience great career success.
But instead he has nothing to talk to anyone about, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing. It's borderline terrifying. Even if he was into comic books and video games it might help, which might help him relate to SOME of the IT staff even if the rest of the people at the company know nothing about it. But he doesn't even have that.
This isn't a solitary field anymore. Even if you truly are "the best" you still have to interact with other people and stay mentally stable enough to not burn out. Even if you know more than everyone else (or think you do) you have to try to broaden your horizons.10 -
I've lost my gf (she said she wouldn't want to be with a programmer, I said 'sure, bye') and found a much better and more fun career path than I had before.
Otherwise my life stayed pretty much intact, except for the fckn compile time errors and occasional 'fix my electronic device' or 'hack this social media account for me' requests. In retrospect it was more than worth it, would switch to be a professional developer anytime again.10 -
So today I had a discussion with my manager that I have been working unpaid overtime everyday (close to 5 hours overtime). She responds with saying that I am quite young (24) and these are my golden years of learning and I should be working overtime for atleast 10 years of my life during the start of my career to learn stuff because I will regret it later. Idk how am I supposed to react to that. She maybe correct, and I do work overtime sometimes out of my own interest but this is getting way too much and pushing it. any suggestions about how do I deal with such a manager?30
-
The software development process.
I can't fix this.
*Crisis of confidence*
*Questions career*
*Questions life*
Oh it was a typo, cool.2 -
At a point in your life, you'll settle down abit, and you start to think about what you've done in the past (idk) years of your life.
Then you think about your career, how everything is ever since you discovered you were good at a certain thing since highschool.
be it programing, writing random codes, pentesting (or if you had that "hacker" phase in your life) or fixing laptops and etc.
"Good"
You think about the word, and you had a thought: You only know how to do it, how it works, how its done, and how to do it.
You only "Know", it takes practice, patience, dedication and years (or months depends on you) of experience before you can really say for sure you're "Good" at it.
Me? Im no where near good. but that doesn't stop me from going there.
And i hope the same goes for you. You can do it,
Have a great day.3 -
Dropped out after 4 months at Uni when I realised that I will learn absolutely nothing useful for my future career. We were either learning HTML/CSS or coding calculators in C# . At this point I was already writing my own PHP CMSs with huge databases for real life clients. I guess I can only blame my course level and maybe I could go someplace else but it probably wouldn't be so much different.
A month after I dropped out I got my first job as a junior Drupal developer. That was 7 years ago, now I'm a FrontEnd dev in a really great environment and throughout the years no one looked at my grades or even asked for them.
Experience and passion as as valuable if not more as your education.5 -
Works as backend developer for 2 years now; Almost fails simple university algorithm course.
I'm contemplating my whole life and career choice right about now.2 -
Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with me.
Thankfully, one of the most important skills that I learned is active listening. I am less vocal about my silly thoughts and shitty opinions these days.
I don't feel dumb. Instead, I realise that I AM dumb.
The people in my new org are exceptionally smart and talented. Each everyone is a hand picked gem. This isn't a coincidence. Rather it's evident that they hire folks very carefully.
In my previous org, I used to be the one driving everything. Like the smartest guy in the room.
But here, I am just quiet in every meeting and I enjoy working 12 hours a day. I am the dumbest guy in the room surrounded by people who are brilliant and humble.
I truly feel fortunate and grateful to be part of such an amazing org and wonderful team. One of the best decisions I made in my career and life.8 -
Today I'm reminded of Robin Williams as the world mourns the loss of Anthony Bourdain.
You may think: "this has nothing to do with development", but I think it does.
I've struggled with anxiety and depression for a long time. Before my passion and love for writing code became my career, I just assumed it was due to not being happy. When it persisted after finally moving into a career when I do what I love, I realized it's much deeper.
When these people who greet the world with smiles, or make us ourselves smile, end up taking their own life... it gives me pause. How many times do I fight back the darkness? Will I ever lose that fight? Will it matter?
Depression is a serious illness. It's not simply someone being ill-equipped to deal with life. Even the most stable-seeming person around us could be battling this darkness in silence.
You only find out when they lose that battle.
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/...6 -
!dev
TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.
Hello folks. Time for a little family story.
This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.
He told me he would pay by the end of June.
Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).
A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.
He literally said:
"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".
He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.
That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).
I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.
I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.
And one of the clauses was.
"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄
He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.
It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.
So that's the background story for the laptop.
Now time for a dinner story.
We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.
When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.
Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.
Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).
I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)
Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.
I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.
And now I'm sad. 🙃
Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?
I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))
It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.
But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.
I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.
I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.10 -
Today, for the first time in my life I quit my job
I feel very happy (refer to any of my older rants), yet i also feel very sad because in spite of all the quirks, it’s a great place to work with super nice people whom I feel like have become a big part of my life in such a small period of time
I very much doubt I’ll ever find a company like this again with such a relaxing atmosphere but I have to think about myself and my career ..
I’m especially incredibly sad about leaving one of my colleagues as he has become one of my best friends these past few months..
Let’s just hope I made the right decision ..8 -
Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.
I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.
I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.
That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.
Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).
I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.
Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.
I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.
Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.
To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?
Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?
There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...20 -
Recent life lessons:
◆ Do not buy a domain name without obfuscating your contact information, lest you want to be harried by people offering to provide their services to “grow your business”
◆ Do not change descriptions on your most recent experience that’s set to be ongoing on LinkedIn without making note of the “notify your followers” toggle, lest you wish LinkedIn to post on your behalf a message urging people to congratulate you on your new position. A post which you cannae delete. And lo, if you comment upon it urging well-wishers to not comment upon it or offer congratulations as it is not what it appears, witness the lack of good that doth do. Resort to canned response to DMs explaining the situation and urging the well-wisher to learn from your misfortune. (I find it really difficult to not politely respond to folk. It was a good two days of like 50+ messages.)
◆ If you have a career coach that tells you to connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn and accept connection requests, perhaps just don’t follow that advice. My second career coach was like “That doesn’t even make sense” “I KNOW!” ... I have so many LinkedIn connections. But I cannae just prune the list because it would take for freaking ever to figure out who was who and who I really still wanted to connect with. *sigh* 900+ is too many. And I have over 100 requests I haven’t even gotten around to looking at.22 -
I am Done! I am extremely burnt out and unhappy with my work. I have been doing this professionally for over 5 years now and much longer than that unprofessionally.
This new company I joined finally gave me the salary I always dreamt of but now I am extremely unhappy and depressed and anxious all the time. And I don't like the work I am doing. I don't like the team. I hate being isolated at home for over 2 years, working from home. I had a mental breakdown in the middle of the meeting the other day. And after that, I said. that's it. I am done. So, I gave the resignation letter. I don't know what I am gonna do. But I sure as hell can't do this shit any longer. But now, the fucking hr is making it even more difficult for me by not letting me leave without serving the notice period. I told her I am on fucking medication and I am having severe mental health issues. Now, she wants to see the medical certificate. Or I have to pay two months' salary. WTF? If I had that kind of money lying around, I wouldn't have slaved myself away at your shitty company, would I?
I went to my psychiatrist whom I have been seeing consulting for the last couple of years now. I asked for a medical certificate and he thinks it'll hamper my future career. So, he said I should get a certificate from a general physician. So, that's the world we live in then? You can't even speak the truth? And the way HR is behaving over the mail makes me feel like a total slave. I mean I am not at all fit for work these days, and it feels like, if she had her way, she would tie me down to a chair and ask me to push out code. what the fucking fuck. This is some fucked up industry and I think I am finally done with software development. But now, I don't have any idea what I am gonna do with my life or how am I gonna earn money. I am so burnt out and anxious that even the thought of working again gives me panic attacks. even working from home. What the fuck do I do?8 -
As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.
Long rant incoming.
Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.
Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.
About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.
What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.
Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.
Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.
This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.
When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.
Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.
On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.
Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'
After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.
To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.
My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.
Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.
After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.
It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.
Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?6 -
!dev (Please, don't take this very seriously, I'm kind of burnt out)
I'm not having a good time.
I can't even write a post to properly explain how I feel.
I feel disappointed by life and by myself in many levels. Life is disappointing. I am disappointing too.
I'm having issues to focus, can't even write a couple of lines of code.
Time to listen to some emo lofi and write about how much I hate myself.
I wished I didn't feel these feelings.
I wished I didn't regret so many things I did or didn't do.
I wished I could fucking understand everything I read, but I don't, everything I read is gibberish, every paragraph makes me feel like I'm drifting in a storm.
I wished I was happy with my career, with my job. I wished I had a true friend.
I wished I could finish one goddamn fucking project for once.
I wished there was something that made me unique, but I don't think there's any.
I just feel like an ant, and that I don't really matter.
I don't feel like I'm someone at all, I feel like I'm experiencing a dream, and a rather boring one.
Programming used to be challenging and fun for me, but it has become this dull and stressful ordeal.
The internet has shown me that I don't matter really. I remember being a little kid and believing that the internet would not discriminate you, that right from the comfort of your house you could connect to people and be cared for, and collaborate in something.
But every year that passes I see that I was wrong. I have tried to put in time into people, I have asked people how they're doing, I have cared for their projects. But there's no reciprocation.
The internet itself has become a thing where the big fish only matters. The top 1k users will get 99% of the attention.
Fuck nurture, rule competition.
What's the point of creating a github project that you think it's cool? No one will give two shits about it, it won't make a goddamn difference whether you push it or not.
You know what fucking matters? If you're an apple or google developer and have thousands of followers.
Bla, bla, bla, I'm depressed...9 -
Well I met my wife and decided my current profession wasn't going to give us the life I wanted for us. So since I did IT communications in the Army, I decided to look into that field, buy I knew I didn't want to do networking; I hated it in the Army. I read about programming I saw that I could learn some for free online before I chose that as a career. I did the website courses on Codacademy and thought it was a lot of fun! So I enrolled in It's software program, got 1 quarter away from an AAS in software development, then while I was on my honeymoon, they shut all the schools down and filed bankruptcy. Now I've started all over and community college to eventually get a BA in computer science.5
-
I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.
This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.
First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.
I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.
A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.
So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.
At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.
Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...
So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.
Never a single word from the community about me.
Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).
I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.5 -
I got my first offer letter and they gave me more than my asking salary. I have been waiting for a year and half for this moment. Nothing can kill this feeling. I have been doing jobs I hate for my whole life. And finally I am able to do what I want and kick off my career. This is awesome.3
-
I am so fucking done with all these incompetent fucktards!!! Why would you keep a client-brief in secret from your colleagues?! Why on your screwed delusional Earth you think it is perfectly okay if you don’t communicate the changes ahead your team? How could you - microbrained prehistoric dinosaur who petrified to your own semen - think that I can estimate with my time and do my work when you are barely able to think ahead 2 minutes without letting me know the actual scope and deadlines???!!! AND NO telling me the day before NOT GONNA MAKE IT VALID!!!! You failed in life you failed in evolution you played my trust and I don’t give horseshit about your career! Go fuck a hedgehog, eat it and shit out on the same fucking day. Tomorrow a new era starts and prepare yourself as I am hereby vow that I am not going to care any of your bullshit! I vow that every time you come to me with a new task, I will start it WHEN I can and do it between 9 and 17 and if anyone asks I will calmly tell the hard truth about the overbred, human shaped, evolutional dead end you are...5
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Thank you VERY MUCH for wasting my life, ruining my new career and destroying my family. It hasn't been 24 hours from joining devRant and I am already addicted. Checking my phone every 5 minutes or so. Is this some kind of a conspiracy to wipe out weak and liable to procrastination devs? To suck them/me to a big, colorful fluffy garden of instant gratification?
Are you HAPPY!!!???3 -
Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.
In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.
Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.
My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.
Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..
When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.
I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.
When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.
I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.
I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.
I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.
devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.
Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.
Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.
I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.
Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.
Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.
Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.
I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.
Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.
I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.
Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...
Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.
Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.
I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.
I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.
I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.
I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.
Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.
I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.
Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)2 -
!dev
I come from a small shitty valley where all that people want to achieve is getting approved for loans to buy more cows and shit.. My only friend comes from there as well but he’s different, more like me.. build a life, get out and pursuit something better and bigger..
We grew up smoking everything we could and drinking everything we got because what else are we gonna do, put shit on fire? Been there, done that.. it sucks growing up on the poop hole of the world.
We both left that shithole and started careers but he’s throwing it all out the window.. he’s getting caught with weed, DUI and shit. just a few years ago he got off of more serious drugs.. He built a career and shit for about 10 years but right now he’s just throwing it all away because drugs are in his comfort zone. But he has to go give Pias samples for a while now and if he doesn’t stop he is not getting his license back and the unemployment insurance won’t even pay him because (although he lost the job because of Covid) they said it’s because he smokes weed.
Without the license goes his career as he’s a service electrician.
So fucking hurtful to see, man.
And so hard to accept that he won’t listen and than I’m not his dad who can tell him what to do..
90% of the kids I grew up with who managed to leave that shit hole ended up as homeless junkies.. I guess I’m happy to have the mindset to not end up like them.. and that’s really all it is, the mindset is the only difference (which is complex in itself of course like parenting and stuff)5 -
Is success luck or hard work?
“Success is luck.”
— the guy who spent 13 hours a day learning for four years straight before the success came
“Success is definitely luck.”
— the guy who sold his soul, become obsessed and traded his social life for skills
“Success is hard work”
— the trust fund baby who barely learned anything through his “career”14 -
Programmer’s life cycle:
- Nothing can stop me today
- A bug huh? let's squash
- I can’t fix this
- Confidence crisis
- Questions career
- Questions life
- Oh it was a typo
- Nothing can stop me today1 -
I am back with some more emotional shit.
So tomorrow is my last working day at my second employer where essentially I'll just walk into the 10 seater serviced office to drop my laptop in a cupboard because no one else is here.
So today, an hour ago, they had a virtual farewell for me and everyone spoke of me highly with specific examples.
Well that's not what this post is about, but the emphasis is that I am still in dual mind of whether I made the right decision to quit my second employer so soon (in just 10 months)?
If I had stayed for two months more:
1. I'd gotten a hike this week
2. More RSUs in that hike along with cash
3. Joining RSUs would have vested for the cliff period of 1 year
4. Tenure would be at least a year
5. Would have found a better job with higher pay (on the new hiked salary).
I surprisingly got the grip of the product and that's when I decided to quit.
The reason I quit is I wanted to optimise for WLB and timezone with better team culture.
While the next job is surely a company I wanted for a long time and that too in B2C space, I really lost my affection for that role and that's where it came to me upfront and I rejected them initially before picking up the offer again.
My second employer is a very global and one of the largest brands. Really wanted to stick around and never got to enjoy the benefits which others did.
Only time can tell, because when I chased something I never got it, when I stopped, it came to me.
And what I am chasing now is something I am unable to achieve.
Why is life so fucked. Seems like I am about to lose one of my biggest and only life and career dream.
Maybe I fucked up this decision. Maybe not. Only time can tell.12 -
Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.
I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.
So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.
I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.
Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.
Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.
Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.
Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.2 -
Imagine: It's the year 4249.
Corporate has finally managed to convince workers that they don't need a salary.
Workers are now paid with food, shelter and clothes. And it's only in effect if you achieve your deadlines.
Keystroke monitoring softwares are now replaced with Webcam eye tracking software.
GitHub Co-Pilot now takes over your code editor and tries to dictate you how to write better code.
Refusing to do results in a signal sent to the management about your behaviour and you lose food access for the day.
HR Recruiters now require you to give them a blood sample and part of your house as a security deposit.
They also require you to have a micro-chip placed in your brain so they can monitor their worker's thought process.
Switching a job is no longer an option. You pledge allegiance to one company your entire career.
You can never see the real world now because the government has mandated you to never take off your VR glasses.
You see the world the way the government wants you to see it.
PHP is still trash.
Life is Good.11 -
If you didn't think NodeJS dependency hell was that bad, you should try sequentially parsing a graph that's stored as an array of nodes and their references, where processing of said nodes forces you to use some async functions that depend on other async functions.
What should have been 20 lines of code written in 30 minutes has turned into 3 hours of horror, reading about babel, realizing that it's just adding more problems without solving one, assessing the effort of modification of async libraries to include sync methods as well, trying out asyncwait, async, and everything else there is, trying to rethink the recursive algorithm, rewriting it several times, cursing and hating myself for not choosing to use Python or .NET Core, screaming senselessly at my wife in a language as familiar to her as Klingon, crying in the bathroom, re-assessing my life choices, thinking whether it was a mistake to dedicate 10 years to this career, maybe I'm just not cut out for it since I can't handle this simple task, watching noose tying tutorials on youtube, thinking about my naked empty RPI that won't connect to the server any time soon.
Seriously. Why is it SO BAD?! Or is it just me?5 -
So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.3 -
!RANT
my friend who never smoke or drink or relationship to much career oriended.working in multinational company. recently south african petrol company gave offer letter to him.
he was ill from few days.(completed his engineering in civil with 9.1 pointer last year.)
somekind of syndrome found in him. due to which he will not able to walk in 2 years.
he share this information with me. asking me tips,"how to inform my mom dad? I don't wan to face them. I can't do anything for them."
life is fucking unfair with some peoples.1 -
Working from third world country means getting paid just 10-20% of world wide salaries and already being happy about it, because your salary is still 4 times higher than other local ones.
Silly wishes for career. To achieve getting paid 90%+ of the salary in the next close years. Or at least 50%.
Some of the local people continue work for 10% salary all their career life here... I wonder why? Why not to fight for your place in the world?10 -
A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol
Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.
Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).
I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.
I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.
Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.
During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.
This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.
Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:
1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.
2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).
I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.
I will win.9 -
I grew up on a farm in western KS. My parents bought PCs when I was in grade school. First was a trs80 , then an Epson Equity 1+, where I built a spare key for it, and built levels in willy for my brother to beat. Then a 486 and pentium which I broke often. I ended up working at the same store in college for extra cash. While I'm an adverage developer, I do on and make decent $$. I still help them out with keeping their PCs running, for moms sewing, and dads Linux box. I figure I owe them for their investment in me. They gave me the tools to figure out what I want to do with my career and my life.2
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As someone deeply questioning their life and career choices as of now, I wouldn't want to become a dev anymore because:
- you spend most of your time burning your eyes on a monitor and getting terrible back pain
- you might sell your soul to company benefits whose only purpose is to make you distracted from the fact that you're basically spending 1/3 of the day wishing you were doing something you actually want to do
- might have to do some exhausting communication ooga boogas to understand what supervisors and your other colleagues want to say (in a small company setting)
- again, as in my previous rant, if you're not on some less disposable dev position, you could as well become something else given that junior salaries are not that high
- get into an unhealthy work world where little hours of sleep, overworking, and other such unhealthy lifestyles are praised or used to determine your worth
Of course, these differ on a case by case basis. I'd become a train driver or something if I still didn't have to eat and not throw more money at a career change
Life's tough2 -
probably most of my life, not just career.
realizing sooner that nobody gives a fuck and nobody will ever help.
realizing sooner that i can make and sell stuff. realizing sooner that the fact that what i sell is shit is completely disconnected from the success of my sales.
realizing aooner than most people are morons.
getting okay with exploiting morons' moronism sooner.
realizing that nobody has morals so unless i drop mine i'm just holding myself back.
stuff like that.6 -
A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.
In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.
Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.
But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.
Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.
I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.
Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.11 -
Dev of 15 years here. All my career historically started and evolved/revolved around Microsoft in one way or the other, so was my exposure to only DOS and the Windows as a child and growing up.
Like already discussed in multiple rants here, I was one of those naturally Windows -favoring ppl through all my life. That is not to say I didn't try Linux here and there, for hosting of personal projects, as one usually does. But it never quite stuck with me as a personal daily driver, mainly because all I ever needed for personal use was a browser, discord, and Steam/GOG/Epic Games store for gaming (work-wise I always had and still have company provided laptops which are OF COURSE Windows powered)
Anyway, maybe you can see where I'm going with this... I recently gave Nobara Linux a go (Glorious Eggroll's Fedora flavor, with some custom kernel patches) and I have to say, not thinking of going back to Windows at all.
Just a few thoughts on comparing two sets of experiences with Win vs Nobara
- Win definitely feels more sluggish
- Nobara's default desktop env was Gnome 42 with some extensions pre-enabled. I dove right into hacking/customizing it to my tastes and it looked glorious. Never would have achieved this customization with Win
- I was using RDP to remote into my work laptop from my personal desktop setup with Windows and I still successfully do so with Remmina now in Linux
- A week ago I dove deeper and installed Awesome window manager as a UI and mh boy does this feel intimidating at first. But then the allure of having nice window managing experience was too strong, and 15 years of coding do help with just seeing a new language and kinda feeling at home instantly (Lua language for AwesomeWM customization/themes). Fast forward a week and now I'm sitting happily with 3 monitor setup, one of them vertical, all properly auto aligned with arandr on startup, variety+wal for wallpaper auto circling and applying a theme out of main wallpaper colors every so often (+wrote a script to put those main colors into my RGB peripherals via OpenRGB)
- Gaming. I still game, Steam Deck from steam gave me all the confidence to set up Linux gaming that I needed. I think I am now properly versed in all things Wine/Proton/Lutris/Bottles/Heroic Games Launcher, you name it. Recently finished Cyberpunk 2077.
ANYWAY, thank you for coming to my Linux appreciation TED talk. It's amazing. -
For me there are two kinds of bugs. The ones where you lean backward and the ones where you lean forward.
If you found a bug and you lean backwards in your chair resting your hands behind your head you feel proud and relieved that you found that sneaky bastard. Good for your dev soul.
If you lean forward, resting your forehead on your fists or on the desk then it was a very stupid bug. Not sneaky at all. Something plain obvious. It makes you doubting all your career and life choices you made so far. Like needing one hour to find out that you named the "MANIFEST.in" accidentally "MAINFEST.in"...
Want to share any embarrassing bugs to make me smile again?5 -
I.T technicians law: regardless of the increases in processing power over the years spent working in your career, you will still spend most of your life watching a progress bar.1
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!rant
The efficiency of every dev stack in the world will never compare to just dropping my folder of php code into a server, with proper configurations, routes envs and everything else into a folder and watch it run.
I a pops shop wants me to build something for them? php
If an enterprise grade with a lot of users comes about? php
I have yet to have a single issue with it as most of you evee poluted, herd ready, mob mentality mfkers want to make believe.
Legit, the language is flawed, but has yet to fuck with me, i have memorized the quirks and fuckups of the language (much like I have done with JS) to know that a lot of you just bandwaggon over shit.
"It DoeSnt hAve proPer geNerics"
boom, deployed a form to a customer for his site, charged $2k for a one day job with no issue. But go ahead, setup an entire fucking pipeline of dependencies, a .net app and/or an entire bs app in node or rails(which I love btw) or an entire fuckState centric app in Go that gets messier the more you look at it and it would not be as easy or as simple to deploy.
Legit, in my entire career, nothing makes my life simpler for the web.22 -
We need to normalize not being a passionate CS guru. You can be good at your job and not have passion for it. You don't have to dedicate your life to your career in every facet.
I don't expect plumbers to sit around their house all day during their free time hooking up water lines. Why is it expected that I'm always reading some dev book or learning some new framework or reading some tech blog?
I do other shit, and that's fine. My job earns me a paycheck and I'll improve on the clock, and when I walk out at the end of the day I leave that shit there.
At most I might converse with you informally about tech but I'm not going to spend my little free time going to meetups and pretending like I care more than I do. If you do that's great, but I'm not you and that's fuckin fine too.10 -
So fed up of existing.
I am not saying that I am suicidal, but if a truck was accelerating towards me, I would not bother to move.
Even though I consider myself decently successful in life in terms of career, friendship, and to some extent, family. I strongly feel that I am in a very wrong environment.
I have zero trust, safety, love, and nurturing care from my parents and others around me.
I lack physical privacy, psychological safety, and emotional void.
My hypothesis is that if I was in a better environment with slightly lesser responsibilities and needs better met, I could have achieved wonders. With that, who wouldn't?
Why do we exist? Just to suffer?25 -
!dev
I’ve been ranting & posting a lot about my career, relocation, work life balance etc. in the last year.
Just wanna say, relocating was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. Professionally and personally..
Although it was a bit scary and I didn’t have any money left after relocating..
It’s 6PM, I’m sitting in the garden, listen to some classical music and don’t spend a single thought on work.
Tomorrow I will arrive in the office around 7:45, I will do my work. My boss recognizes my teams effort and thanks all of us for the work on the end of each sprint.
There are no personal fights in the team, everyone is getting along with the others.
I do some good work, get a good salary and don’t have to mix up work and personal life.
The people here are awesome, everyone is welcoming and supportive.
If everything goes as planned, I’ll be able to buy my dream car by the end of summer because the government doesn’t take all of my money. They take their taxes before I get my salary and the money I get is the money I HAVE..
Ireland is awesome.
At this point: thanks for the Irish guys here who provided information about work and life over here! And also to the other devs who supported me here👍2 -
Typical code life?
1. Write rough comments
2. Write more detailed comments
3. Write pseudo code
4. Write semi-working but definitely ugly code
5. Write working but very ugly code
6. Refactor the code to be nicer, check for patterns, bottlenecks and other bits and pieces
7. Push to git the "final" code
8. After few months blame whoever wrote the code
9. Refactor all the things!
---
This happened in my career more than once and still - it seems like the best option out there to get things done. What do you guys think? Should something be added/removed from this? Is this over-complicated or what?2 -
So after 7years of sound engineering, I started working as an intern in a startup company which does "anything" for money.
( Sending me to a seminar for taking photos of our customers is also in the list. )
Yesterday, I managed to grasp the basics of node and web sockets to build a simple chat app in order to satisfy boss' needs for a small website. He wanted to add it as a feature and assigned it to me as a task but it turns out nobody has any idea about putting it online. Seems like I still have lot to do.
Thing is, this is my 3rd month and I already started making no sense to anyone when I try to exchange information about coding/programming and latest technologies which we should encountered long ago. I am happy to experience and learn different things but I am feeling really alone.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for boosting me with amazing real life experiences and supporting my career changing decision even without knowing.
Have fun ranting!1 -
I was junior developer. My friend recommended me for JavaScript Senior developer in the company he was working. He had settle the interview without asking me. I knew a little of javascript, but I was not ready for this interview at all and I knew that.
So I went to the interview. The questions were very difficult and complex for me, I answered two question of ~15. I was very upset, I was sweаty and blushed ... one of the most uncomfortable moments in my career.
After the questions, the interviewer decided to give me a MacBook to do an exercise with JavaScript to see me in action. The exercise was easy, but MacBook ... Damn it, I saw a MacBook for the second time in my life. I knew the solution of the task, but I was very slow in implementation because of Mac..
After 15 minutes of slow coding and sweating, the interviewer said "OK, just finish it at home and send the code to my email...".
When I got home, I made the perfect solution for 30 minutes and I sent it to him. The only answer was "ok, tnx" and that guy didn't call me anymore.
This is kind of rejection I think ;)3 -
This is a public service announcement with a threat at the end of it:
"Do not, I repeat, do NOT attempt to write web applications, or any particular sort of application that works with a relational database (damn near more than half of applications) without a PROPER grasp and knowledge of SQL.
I do not want to see you reaching out for an ORM either, no, you need to learn to properly design a database or to properly interact with them AT most before you even attempt using an ORM OR designing an application from the beginning, shit will only hurt you in the long term I promise, learning SQL can go a looooong fucking way and most DBA's I know make way tf more than people think they make, it might even be an interesting career choice"
If you do not follow the above advise, and I see your ass reaching for building a web application without the above knowledge I will be under your bed at night, putting oil in my hairy body before I jump into bed to you and leave you confused for the rest of your life.
Build to learn, YES, but for the love of Chamberlain and Boyce PLEASE do not neglect SQL. I have seen such neglect REACH production and I am currently wishing I had these mfkers close to me.9 -
Random thought of the day. I'm sure I've been told the "common wisdom" is that you can take a job with a lower salary and enjoy a better work-life balance, or go gung-ho for the inner city jobs and earn way more but sacrifice your quality of life.
Anyone else found the complete opposite? The higher the salary I've had over my career, generally the *better* the working environment and the more the employer seems to care for, and value its employees. Not universally true I'm sure, and perhaps I'm just lucky about where I pick, but I've certainly had way more "high stress" situations in some of my lower paid, rather than higher paid roles.9 -
I'll give you a few reasons to walk away from a dev's chair:
1. if you want your life to be simple and not challenging, if you just want to go with the flow - choose something else. Dev's life will definitely bring some challenges to your day (and sometimes night, and sometimes - your weekends). Especially if you feel you are a perfectionist, dev life could turn your life into a living hell if not handled with care.
2. If you like to see people smiling, if you love that feeling when you help someone and that someone has a better day thanks to you - choose something else. 1st line SD would probably do, but the further from technology you go - the more smiles (and human faces overall) you'll see.
3. If you prefer person-to-person interaction over to talking to machines - definitely don't be a dev. Go to management, administration or smth else, but development. >90% of the human interaction in this field is arguments and conflicts; ~8% are requests for assistance, and the remaining 2% are shared by saying "hi" to the office administrator and your (semi|)annual reviews with your manager. Not kidding.
4. If you have a personality where you find it difficult to stand your ground and not budge to the pressure/blame game/your managers asking you to stay in late. Like it or not, it happens quite often. Many devs have spoiled the management by budging to their requests/demands to stay for OT/unpaid OT to "fix the mess they have made". That's a blame game right there. And these people stay in and do what the slaves do - work for free because they are yelled at. And then management sees this technique work and (ab|)uses it on other devs. If you can say NO and stick to it, prolly wave with some printed paragraphs of labour law in front that manager's nose - it won't be a problem. But if your consciousness is too troubling - stay away from this field of engineering.
5. If you want to easily "disconnect" from work and go do something else - dev's career might be a problem. Yes, your computer might be shut down/hibernated/suspended after 5pm until 9m the next morning, but your brain will most likely keep trying to solve the problems you were facing. You'll prolly use your own computer to do some research, check some forums, docs, etc. - this is all your free time, this is all your family time donated to your manager (and to your personal knowledge base). Not to mention, all these things you learn will soon enough become obsolete, as new technologies will replace them. So if you'd like to easily "disconnect" after 5pm, doing that as a dev might be too challenging.1 -
Not even 30 yet and I feel like I've reached a point of stagnation in my career. I no longer enjoy writing code. What else is there to do? My life is set up right now so that I must be a software engineer; I don't have much of a choice.
I feel trapped.10 -
A guy came from another city, just to teach a little bit on how to improve productivity, and after almost 2 hours of him telling stories about his life and career, in five minutes he told us to delete games and facebook from our cellphones, and only focus on learning and work related apps... And He tried to sell us the complete series of books and videos with the full content on productivity in the end...4
-
Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.
While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).
In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.
As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.
I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.
The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.
I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.
The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.
Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.
I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.
Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.
So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited! -
Because I didn't start coding until 21 I constantly feel behind, but the pure satisfaction from finally getting something to work or to see a project grow iteratively over time keeps the gears turning. The bad part is I feel like I am constantly stressed because of my feelings of always being inadequate. The thing is I didn't only have to learn how to code but I basically had to start from scratch tech wise. i had a decent acer laptop in high school and basically just web browsed and gamed with it. So needless to say most of my life has been away from a computer. Now I feel at a constant rush to compensate for my ignorance. I have slowly become more introverted because I feel like if I don't work on my skill set everyday I stray further away from making myself marketable; this has caused me to become more irritable and to close myself inside more. I want to make a career doing this and I also have the added pressure of not having a degree, so projects and skills are even more mandatory. I truly love programming to the fullest extend, but not having local friends to express code with and to bounce concepts and ideas off of is torture. But I try to keep my head up and make progress out of the day- if the will is there- so I can land my first job as a developer and actually make a living doing something that brings me a little piece of meaning. So overall there is a tradeoff of having added pressure, stress, anxiety and sometimes depression to build a craft that still has ages to go to reach a stage of maturity.10
-
Not so much in my work but more my career.
My dad has been a great role model, still is and always will be.
He was an hard working metalworker. He loved his job. It's not a 50k job but he could easily manage his life.
My dad showed me that doing what you love, working with passion, makes your life easier and more fun. You deliver high quality products, because you care.
Since I found out that I love programming, I made it my life goal to do it as my career.
I've never been happier before. After all, I make money with my hobby.1 -
So I have a question.
How do you freelancers keep motivated? I'm a web developer and that's all I do. However i made a mistake of dedicating myself a little too much.
I moved to a new country and started with all these new projects that started becoming successful however when I started making friends in Uni and out , those friends were less of friends and I treated them more like workmates who I can share projects with and work on new orojects. Because of this, my career overtook me to the extent that that was all I ever worked on. Literally.
It was only recently that I realized that I have been missing out too much. I miss having a life and being with friends. recently I lost my creativity and productivity. Gave up on an insanely huge project because I have not been able to work on it. Lost a job because Im not productive. My life has started falling apart and I don't know how to keep it controlled. I feel I can't bother my friends because we're not totally close and most are only friends on campus.
I don't know what to do where to start or how to be productive again.9 -
Goal for my dev career future?
Start my own company that hopefully makes enough money to make me financially independent and lets me live the life I want.4 -
Honestly... I'm my own biggest influence. I had a career shift from law enforcement to developer. I hated my job, my life, where I was at and where I was going. I never want to be in that position again so I got myself to a point where I have more freedom and opportunities.
-
Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!
Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.
FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!
Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.
FC: 😧2 -
Hi all,
This might be a long post so bear with me. I work for a company and there was a project for a huge client. I'm junior in skill (been programming for about two years) but my job title doesn't reflect that. Anyways, I got the design about a month ago but I was on deadline for two other projects so I couldn't pick it up until last week Wed. Ironically, that's when the final design was delivered & told me it was due next week Wednesday. I built it as fast as I could. Finished mobile but for some reason, this last part for desktop just wasn't working out and it just so happens to be the most crucial part of the piece. (I was also sick the entire time and didn't sleep for the last two days nor did I eat). I was supposed to demo it yesterday but I still needed to make a few updates and the project coordinator took me off the project & gave it to a dev with more experience. This has never happened to me before. I'd go as far as to say this is my first big fuck up. I've always delivered on deadline and I'm taking this pretty hard. Has anyone been in similar situations? What do I do? Any advice?1 -
coolest thing I ever built?
My career..
except it's not cool, and not sure if it's a career at all.. not so good on a thing, just some knowledge here and there..
now I am sad about my life -
College is worse than cancer.
Worse than tumor.
Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.
I feel dull.
I feel DUMBED DOWN.
I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.
6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.
Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.
I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.
Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.
The professors and assistants have no morals.
They are INHUMANE.
Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.
If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.
Professors have NO COMPASSION.
NO DIGNITY.
They are just BRAINLESS robots.
Sentients, agents working for the matrix.
They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.
IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.
I gave my maximum effort.
I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.
Just to end up with school spitting on my face.
I feel DUMBED down.
Robotic.
Procedural minded.
As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.
Like a computer.
Because of college - i have no will to live.
Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.
Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.
Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...
I feel void inside me.
I also feel vengeance inside me.
SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.
It made me mentally insane.
It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.
PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.
MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.
What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?
What if the student is abused by a family member?
What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?
What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?
What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???
There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.
BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.
I feel soulless.
I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.
School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".
Lets talk about it.
What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?
To memorize pdf slides?
Memorize textbook?
Memorize notes?
Memorize formulas?
Memorize memorize memorize???
First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.
SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.
If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".
BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.
I self-learned everything.
6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.
NOT EVEN ZERO.
LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.
I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.
I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.
I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.
At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.
At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.
Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.
Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.
Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.
---
To all professors and assistants:
I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.9 -
!rant
I know it's not that impressive in the dev world, but I'm finally making six figures (the lowest six figure value possible but STILL) and I can't really brag to my friends about dollar amounts so HURRAH. Accepted the offer yesterday, and I'm quite pleased about it.
Annoyed that it took so long (I'm 29), but I did have a two year long career break for a family medical issue/travel/quarter life crisis, so so it goes.10 -
I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.
TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.
I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.
I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.
So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.
I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.
So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.
I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.
Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.
The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).
So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.
If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.
I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.
Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.3 -
FUCCCCKKKKKKKKKK!
I need to get off this frustration out of my system.
I have a autistic retarded sister who has less than a half brain cell.
Evolution from fish to humans was faster than completion of a task assigned to this faggot.
I fucking hate her. Why was I born in this family. Fucking why!!!!!
Autistic narcissistic cunt. Horrible human.
Doesn't have any friends, no family member cares for her, entitled bitch, earns less than $75 a year.
Whenever we meet, she makes sure to belittle me in front of our parents and gives advices and gyaan on how superior she is and how much waste of oxygen I am.
Constantly mentions that my career choices are stupid, whereas she is doing great (in reality she isn't even able to score a simple degree and no one is willing to hire her).
Acording to her, I have zero financial literacy and she is a genius (in reality I am managing the entire family finances and providing for everyone).
Even when I ask her about something, she says that I am asking stupid questions where as in reality she is an anti vaxxer. God damn fuck!! She was stopping my parents to get vaccinated. Fucking bitch.
There's a simple 20 minute task regarding some tax work and she took more than 2 weeks to even comprehend my request and now screams at me for raising the request on the last day. Bitch WTF! I told you well in advance and now you fuck me up entirely.
My parents are so fucking biased and will blindly side her because she is a girl and using this argument they have destroyed me emotionally over years.
Yes, I no longer care for any of these maniacs and want to leave this place asap.
For now, for the life of me, I am ready to pay more than $3500 extra in taxes than deal with this woman child.31 -
So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.
That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.
I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.
My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.
To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.
I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.
Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.
I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.
I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?
I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.
Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.5 -
1.
Accuracy 0.90 achieved so easily, makes me wonder if I've done something wrong. Lol.
2.
My neural net models are the only things in my life doing well. I think I chose the right career. Lol.
3.
Rerunning experiments is not fun. But getting better results is really... Ego stroking.26 -
One thing that @scout taught me is to wear the oxygen mask myself before helping others. Oh she is a sweetheart.
This advice has stuck with me since and slowly & steadily, I am regaining my lost confidence and self love.
Remember, how I was struggling for clarity a couple of months ago? But now, I feel more clear in head.
During the start of the pandemic, I joined a community of corporate normies. I used to live happier until that decision.
That place made me ultra competitive and I subconsciously became a rat trying to win the race. I damaged myself more than I benefited.
I joined at the time of inception. Every core member is a good friend.
Now the fun thing is, they moved to Slack. Many of the core members run the community as admins.
While I don't engage much, but talk to some of them occasionally.
One key area is, running a job board to help people get jobs. And another is mentorship to help the members overcome challenges and grow in their career.
In DMs, literally every core member who is doing this for others is struggling themselves for the same. How fucking ironic!
They seek help and advice from me and vent out their failure frustrations.
Imagine, someone who isn't able to solve their problem, let alone solving it first before helping others, is guiding the community of few thousands to excel in their careers.
Fucking brilliant.
One of the biggest life lessons @scout taught me, wear your oxygen mask first before helping others.48 -
!rant but kinda.
!dev but also dev
Hello, my name is ***** and I already had a few Old Fashions🥃
I've been chasing a big career and success since i was about 12.. the first 8 years of my career I did the same.
for the last two years i decided to slow down, I'm still keeping up with stuff and do a good job but I took a break from wanting to being the next Wozniak.
Im much happier and more relaxes now but I'm at a point where i really wanna do, be and achieve more..
My #1 goal in life is to build a family, having a wife and a few kids. (first gotta be able to talk to women though:/)
i have a very strong desire to have an impact on the world and society to build a life in which at least my (non existing) family could be happy and without worries. but i've no fucking clue how to achieve that. how to have an impact. i don't see a way as a software engineer anymore..
i feel lonely and lost without any fucking perspectives..
i feel like i was better off when i was chasing the big money..
i know dev rant is not the place to do this but i can't talk to my family and i wanted to share my emotions. been alone for 3 months now and it's also about my dev career, that's how i justify to post this to our community here😅4 -
That moment you realize you are at the end of that period of life when you have a lot of free time...
I recently moved and live on my own. I'm still studying and I'm finding small jobs as a developer (I make the money I need to live). So far so good, but recently I found out that the career path I'm taking it's not what I actually want to do.
I do not regret it, I'm happy and I feel lucky comparing myself to others in my country.
But I can't stop thinking that the more I go on the less choices I can make freely and that growing up sucks sometimes.2 -
1) Never be afraid to ask questions.
There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.
Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.
That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.
2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.
3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.
4) Find hobbies outside of tech!
5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.
6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.
7) Negotiate salary. Always.
8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.
9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.
10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path. -
*confession*
I'm one of *those* developers that sold their soul to Microsoft technology stack early in their career, and then bought in into even more narrow specialization, SharePoint dev (Could easily have been Dynamics or similar) ...
...And almost don't regret it. The only concern is becoming obsolete in time, but I suppose life of a developer is always learning, so all should be fine.
Major kudos to all non-MS developers, I enjoy reading about your lives here.5 -
Coding has given me a creative outlet. It's filled me with more frustration than anything else I've experienced. It's given me profound joy through successful projects. It's provided me a career which supports my family.
Coding has done a lot for my life... -
Being a parent I've come to the conclusion that my "career" isn't a priority, my kid is.
Thats also because I'm at a position wherein i know that even with a non 100% effort towards work i can still get substantial results
I've been thinking now that I've come to this conclusion, would i want to raise my child in a way that she herself comes to a similar conclusion eventually. As in follow a career path, grow, become a parent and realise your priorities aren't the ones you always thought they were.
Or should I raise her to be focused on life and not try to make a mark in the world.. by focusing on the little things and not the grand picture.
Parents only comments are suggested here8 -
I heard in one dev podcast saying "Know everything about something and something about everything". I think it's very good moto in your dev career and general in life3
-
Have a big legacy project which should be updated to current technologies,
but when it's done, these current technologies are outdated already, so you
Have a big legacy project which should be updated to current technologies, -
can't believe it but things actually have started to fall into place on their own, career-wise. feels unreal. need to work enough to afford a cottage with a cobblestone path & my life will be complete2
-
Honestly, school is useless for me as of right now. I know I should be well rounded and stuff, but do I honestly need to know the symptoms of cervix cancer while going into a tech career? My eyes have been set on tech for my whole life, ever since I left the womb, and I know that if I do switch careers, it'll be from comp sci to cyber security not from IT to med school...
I feel like I could really be devoting my time towards something better than writing a 5 page essay on a healthy food choice.
Every night I think to myself, "You know what, I'm going to lock myself in a room and write bash scripts all day" but then I wake up in the morning, and remember I have to take a quiz on reproductive systems, learn about the procedure of organ donations for driver's ed, write 2 paragraph definitions of vocab words, and read a book about communism.
The most useful thing I learned last year, was how to efficiently navigate the java API, and that's something you don't even learn, you just encounter it. Schools need to start having more specific specialties and stop enforcing knowledge of pointless topics.
I'm not saying to remove all core classes and stuff, I'm saying why waste space in our brains with something we won't use ever again? I get it, some people don't know what career they're looking for yet so you can't make them choose, but it honestly sucks some serious ass that I can't learn what I want to at school, and as a matter of fact, I can't even learn at home, because they're filling my schedule with pointless work because they feel that they have to fill our time somehow.
Point of this long ass rant is: Why lock yourself in a room and learn about something if it isn't something you want to learn about? The space in our brain is finite enough, why can't it be filled with things we're interested in rather than things that will only be used to get good grades in the future then overwritten with useful knowledge. Same thing with time. We have a very finite amount of time in a day, and now that I think of it, a lifetime. Why spend it on something that doesn't, and never will, make your life enjoyable?7 -
Have you ever felt that you are just existing mechanically like a robot?
I went through a dark phase and came out on the other side stronger. Though people helped me but technically I was all alone.
I have had countless people tell me that I inspire them.
I used to get approached by so many every week for mentorship and career advice.
One of my closest college friend said he survived extreme Schizophrenia and depression because of my support.
Hell, I have had people tell me that they are alive today because of me.
I never bragged about my achievements unless asked. People said they feel light and positive after talking to me. They felt I gave them a sense of purpose.
I used to have immense clarity in my life. My life path used to be crystal clear.
Many even said I am the happiest they met.
But with recent narcissist abuse, all my life, emotions, and positive energy drained out of me. Literally squeezed. My biggest regret.
I can no longer feel a soul within me. I cannot feel happiness. I am fucking lost.
I am just existing like a mechanical machine and I hate it. This is taking me longer to heal than the time frame I anticipated.
I feel this will take some more time for me to heal but I am 100% sure I'll fucking bounce back and bounce harder.
I'll dream again...
I'll smile again...
I'll make new friends again...
I'll love again... I'll live again... -
Being an unsupervised junior developer, I wonder how shitty the code I write is, and how being unsupervised will affect my future in this career.5
-
!tech
recently i have been realising that i am utterly lonely. their isn't a group of people in life (apart from my parents) who aren't either paid to be with me (i.e office colleagues) or i am paying to be with them (i.e gym) and its very sad.
i don't have any siblings. the relatives are on sour terms, so no one visit. my parents are mostly loveless and the whole family is just focusing on sustaining than living or enjoying. i recently had some arguments with my friends and now they too are not on talking terms. .
I am a 25 year old, short , somewhat chubby guy in the most boring and safe field with no interesting interests except an average guy stuff ( cars, stocks, tech, career, sports... things that guys usually discuss).
I have been told on face that my vibe isn't interesting and i can honestly accept that . i myself wouldn't want to be with someone like me. if you are girl, then i will probably be talking to you for 30 seconds of joke-cum-fun-cum-serious-cum-caring stuff( i usually have 1-2 lines of witty stuff prepared) before going all silent and boring you the fuck out.
the next convo will be followed by an even dumber sentence but i will try to end it with a geeky joke or reference and a small laugh prompting you to also smile or fake laugh. and if you did that, then i will be desperate to keep you laughing, but my sentences will keep on getting more dumber and boring until you leave and categorise me as the most boring idiot/ "nice guy" you met. ( and meanwhile i am at the mental stage where i love you as the most precious thing of my world and imagining kids and life with you)
I can't care for anyone. I have seen too much parent fights, empty walls, money issues to understand how to care for anyone . my life is focused and sad.
shall i go on giving chocolates to everyyone in office to be popular? shall i ask a random gorl on the stret for her phone number? shall i start strolling in the park and try to talk to people? honestly, if i were a girl and someone does this to me, i would be shit scared and creeped out than falling for that guy.
then how the fuck i land myself into someone who wants to be with me? do i even want someone to be with me? or is loneliness the only thing i want?
i feel pretty okay for the most part of the day in this loneliness, except at some weird times like when am eating a platefu9 of chinese alone in some shop, or at night when i lock the door of a 9x9 large room and realise that i am the only one here.
i was once excited to grow up and do grown-up stuff like drive a car, take a solo tour, goto vaccination in every few days, be adventurous . but that has changed . i did all these things when i had people in my life. i somewhat felt motivated to do those, seeing that there were people who wanted to be with me during/after these things and care about me. now it just feels pointless.9 -
So... concerning the rant on here: https://devrant.com/rants/4299469/...
I'm making my comment as a separate rant because the thread from the original rant was too long and also slowly deviated outside context.
"Why has the rate of female developers reduced overtime?".
Here is my take:
It's natural and I'll explain why I think so...
During my computer science school days we had seventy two (72) males compared to just twelve females (12) in class. The girls could compete in theoretical grounds but when it comes to real coding they were no where near.
This boils down to the passion for programming as a real world subject. In programming you feel rewarded when you "fix a bug" and you're filled with pride when you "learn a new language". This reminds us of the scientific research of boys being more attached to reward engaging activities, most times for bragging rights while for the girls they'd prefer compassionate activities where they can easily be noticed, but unfortunately enough in programming "you only notice yourself".
We can clearly see the mode of career options in our world today...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with people (Compassionate reward)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Front desk officer... Female populated
* Support personnel... Female populated
* Nurse... Female populated
* Flight attendant... Female populated
* Childcare workers... Female populated
* Preschool/KG Teachers... Female populated
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with things (Intrinsic reward)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Engineer... Male populated
* Electrician... Male populated
* Welder... Male populated
* Carpenter... Male populated
* Programmer... Male populated
From the list you'd notice females prefer jobs that are compassionate in reward, require minimal physical activities and also able to make them easily recognisable.
On the other list, male populated jobs are intrinsic in reward, physically inclined, working more with things than with people.
Now seeing the clearer picture, we could sincerely say this is nature at its finest because we have here a balance. Females are kid bearers and we shouldn't be surprised that they are more compassionate to people than with things. Males have more pride than compassion which is needed to protect a family and this indirectly affects their choice of selection.
In reality...
Females are more attracted to Males with pride.
Males are more attracted to Females with compassion.
I would say, it's all the doings of nature affecting our unconscious career options while we seek to find our purpose in life.29 -
My image of dream career through different times of my life:
- frontend specs prodigy, css enlightenment, a member of w3c or a similar committee
- indie hacker and entrepreneur, leader of a startup community
- architecture prodigy, expert in scalability
- transsexual evangelist, popular article writer and a rockstar
- hardware engineer: Linux, C, chip and dale’s Gadget-like girlfriends, xkcd, latex, assembly, buying a radio station and a telescope
- scientist like NickyBones, papers, data, more data
- art expert
Though achieving one of this would take the entire life, I had a chance to grasp all of this. WHY does they feel so incompatible? Why do I have to choose?
Why do I feel so sad? Why do I feel like I haven’t achieved anything even though I objectively achieved what I dreamed of like five years ago?
Is it true that it’s in my nature to always seek an environment to feel like a junior in? Is feeling like a junior only pleasant to me because it reminds me of old times when I wasn’t actually this mentally ill and was still happy?
Why do I feel like that arduino and C shit is the equivalent of a red corvette?6 -
You know, I've really been thinking about renouncing my love for Microsoft's products. I got into the tech world through them, so their stuff was all I really knew. It's like a non-dev growing up using Mac and iPhone. You don't really know what other hardware and software can do (especially since Microsoft is now acting a LOT like Apple nowadays). Ever since they killed Windows Phone, I started seeing past the rose-colored glasses. They've annoyed me with one slip-up after the next. The only things that have kept me tied to them are my Windows Insider membership, and their developer platform. Now that I've seen things like Fuchsia and Linux, I realize that the way Microsoft is going about technology is painful to developers and consumers alike, and this is now beginning to hurt their bottom line. I'm sick of it.
The issue is that if I leave the Microsoft platform, I will have no time to waste. I spent the last 2 yeas cozying up to them, and now I will need to find other platforms, languages, and utilities to build a portfolio from. This also means that I will despise pretty much every major tech company for different reasons (Apple for locked-down hardware, Microsoft for locked-down software, Google for it's monopolistic actions and its unfair policies and terms, Amazon for its invasiveness, etc). If things get worse, I'll probably end up going to Linux and joining the open-source community. The only worry I have is what I'll do for a career. I'm almost halfway to getting an Associates in Computer Science, but where do I go from there? Can't make a living open-source (unless I get patrons, which is unlikely), will probably abandon my dream of joining Microsoft or Google, and I don't currently specialize in any particular area of development yet. I want to spend my life dealing with tech and software. But right now, I've got next to no plans. I've got a lot of thinking to do...2 -
Hi Everybody,
Here by I introduce you the new Java Script framework and package manager that is going to change your life forever. We have considered all the problems developers are facing during their everyday career. We use latest techniques used in configuration files (xml, yaml, json, etc.), package managers (npm, gulp, yawn, etc) and other frameworks (require-js, vuejs, reactjs, etc) into consideration to bring you a framework that has them all together in ONE BIG PACKAGE! HAHAHAHAAHAAA!
Nope. I'm just kidding :-D1 -
Dads of DevRant: Will I ever be able to work on personal projects again? I have a half-complete project that was going really well, that I have immense enthusiasm and drive for, but I just can't get to it, kids/family takes up 100% of my time & it's honestly depressing me. I'm finally at a stage in my career/skills where I could complete this; the technicals and business are all within my grasp, but I've fucked myself by having a family, my life isn't mine any more, I gave it up. Not their fault. But will it ever get better? Maybe someone out there understands this pain; nobody around me does, I keep it inside.14
-
So this one is interesting.
As I have mentioned on my site, I'd be one of the below:
1. Anthropologist
2. Archaeologists
3. Sound engineer
4. Musician or Artist of some kind
5. Travel guide
6. Museum curator
7. Or maybe own & run a Burger joint with Rock n' Roll playing all day
After spending much time in front of screen, I felt like would on field job be better for me, in terms of physical and mental well being?10 -
One day, one of my clients asked me to re-design their website that is running on Wix. I thought It was not a big deal... Just a couple fucking drag-drops & boom.
But while designing, I realized what a fucking piece of shit Wix developers made over time. I've never used to suck a disgusting website builder ever in my entire life.
I write codes to build any type of website, web app etc. I was happily living my dev life. But, after using Wix for 24 fucking hours, I hate my job as a web developer.
Wix is so bad that I lose all my confidence & doubt about my 5 years of web development career.
Fucking piece of shit.4 -
Is it possible to have a midlife crisis at 27?
The "software biz" swallowed me up and except for money and a career I don't have anything.
Turned down multiple management positions because I dont wanna deal with other people, I just wanna be challenged while being let alone
I know I said this before but once again I'm thinking about buying a small house with lots of land.. get some cows, maybe chickens, work remotely and make my own life on my little property.6 -
I don't feel ready to search for jobs. I don't feel that coding is for me.
There is this guy that wanted to study physics and changed to System Information. He is more logical and rational than me. I'm too "emotional" to code, I get stressed easily when something isn't working.
I'm doing this because I wanted to challenge and prove myself that I could be more. I could have been a teacher, but I thought that it wasn't enough for me and I wanted to go further.
Every day I'm outside of my comfort zone and I don't know where this path will lead me and I'm scared and at the same time, I'm hoping for a happy end.
Maybe my brain is not made for coding, maybe it is more on the database side. But I'm sure of one thing: this year I'll give my best and everything at my current internship to get better at coding with Android Studio, Windows Form, Angular and React. My results will determine if I''m a good fit for coding.
Remember one thing: not everyone can easily learn how to code, but you will never know if you don't try it. Go out of your comfort zone in your life and you will meet a whole new world.2 -
!dev
There are two weeks left until the PhD application results are published. But I'm having such awful nervous breakdowns. I don't even know, if it's anxiety or if I'm literally dying inside from something else. From an almost-heart-attack today when I got a trivial and unrelated bad-news email, to keep having weird dreams about things like end of the world and post-apocalyptic life, or being jumpy all the time.
... And it's not like it's life or death, I know that. I know that I can do other things if this doesn't stick. I know things will workout the way they should; I know all of those. But there's just something destroying my physical and mental health right now, and I don't even know if it's just the anxiety for the next big step in my career, or something else, or how I should deal with it.
... Anyways, amannoyed.7 -
I know recursion is everywhere but I recently noticed it in very unusual place('unusual' in the way we see), I hail from India, we studied in our childhood about road less taken, the way I see, everyone has to take so important decisions in yheir life, one such decission is about career, in India road less taken in career paths is everything other than orthodox education, I too the dreaded road "Education", next decission is to choose stream and there the road less taken is anything other that "Engineering (or medicne) " and I took (*as expected) engineering, after taking computers (which is the dreaded road now) next decision is what next? Dreaded road is job, but this time I chose take a road little less traveled in CS. Then I next decission was to choose the research stream the road less taken here (NOW) is systems as AI is in its prime and everyone whants to ride the wave, but I chose Systems in research, after all these my point how how boolean function is called recursively (in the sense of construct) and as a systems programmer I realize the importance of optimizing how I answer these functions quick and accurate. This is one such boolean function but I am sure you can find many in our path till here so It is better to realize what these functions are optimize then as a good Programmer of your own Life.
-
soo after finishing 1 year of my 2 yr CS program, i moved back to my hometown so my partner wouldn't have to keep commuting for her career. couldnt get a cs job here with no experience and only 1 yr of school and like basically no portfolio to show for myself, i took a customer service job in a tech company with a lot of support for career pathing.
end goals are to end up working for their software dev team, mid goal is to switch into their web dev team from customer service since the career pathing is WAY easier from customer service to web dev, then web dev to sw dev rather than customer service straight to sw dev
so in the meantime i need to be practicing and building my portfolio but FUCK i have NO motivation and with coronavirus fucking up my life and everybody elses all i wanna do at the end of the workday and on weekends is melt into my bed in a semi-comatose state
i woke up early today to get some work done on my portfolio but all im doing is watching grey's anatomy and playing mobile games
i used to feel so motivated and excited to code but the excitement is gone and now even doing stuff for myself is a lot more like work than play
just need to rant it out rn4 -
This is my first ever post on DevRant, and it will be more of a question: Is the tech sector more toxic than others?
I've been working for my entire adult life in tech, supporting tech companies of basically any scale. I've always worked in engineering teams, building the core software/product of the company. After years of passion and working hard, I believe I gained some skills in what I do.
However, every so often I reach a point where I feel burned out by all the chaos going on around me. I work as an "expert" in engineering and frequently I get the feeling that I'm not being listened to. Any feedback I give seems to be disregarded.
On top of that, I've met many people with a rather aggressive/abusive communication style. Engineers who truly believe they're far above and beyond everyone else, but with little to back that up. Talking shit about their predecessors, trashing junior engineers,...
I've seen behavior toward women that is grossly inappropriate. I've seen female coworkers cry more than once because they don't feel heard. I've seen coworkers being criticized for personal life choices they made.
In almost every company I've worked at, there was at least one engineer who was so stubborn that it became nearly impossible to work with. Just shutting people up, forcing the rest to follow their plan, and failing to provide any form of accountability when results don't pay off.
Here's the thing. I love developing products. I care about the people who want to use them. I really try to be nice to the people I work with. I started working in this sector because I really wanted to make a difference. However, all of that melts as snow on a sunny day, when I experience toxic behavior.
I am wondering if this is the same in every sector or if these problems are specific to working in tech. Is it maybe because tech is male-dominated and we've lost touch?
Every so often, when I lose my job or leave by burning out, I wonder... Is the grass greener on the other side? Would I be happier choosing another career?9 -
This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:
In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.
If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.
For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.
Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.
It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.
I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.
All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.
Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.
The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.
#wk171 -
Family support (2 phases)
When I was younger my mom bought me a 486 from the cow spotted company.
I didn't do much development as being kinda isolated in computer land didn't really make that easy to understand / do, but I messed with everything else.
At that time (somewhere near the invention of the wheel) just exposure to computers really gave a huge leg up on getting into tech.
Moving on until MUCH later in life I was working in tech, often with developers, but not in development. That company was acquired by an overseas company, the head of the new company appeared on the white house lawn and Trump said this would be great for America jobs ... so of course they laid a huge number of people off just before the acquisition.
I was kinda done with that corner of the industry, no matter how good you are / who you work for it was an area that just sort of decays in in importance. I'd go visit the developers and they'd share their excess free lunches they got each day.
Then I'd go back to my corner of the offices and read an email about how the quarterly crappy ass pizza party (that maybe cost a couple hundred busks) was called off due to "cost cutting".
By this time I've got a family and kids, and I decide to take a chance at starting a new career and they were kind enough to go along with my "sleep, care for family, school, care for family, code, sleep" lifestyle for a number of months.
And it worked out. -
Wow, I would have to write a book to describe all of the positive ways coding and a long career in technology have impacted my life.
In short, it has provided me with a great life, career, passion and so many friends I can 'talk shop' with.
A great journey from punch cards to PC's to LAN's to a global network. From 8" platters to 10mb Bernoulli boxes to 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 to terabytes in your pocket!
From Brick size 'mobile' phones and 35 lb Compaq and Osborne 1 'laptops' (I know some of you remember those) to today's amazing miniaturization.
From MS DOS and Dr. DOS to lots of OS's. I had better stop as it seems I am writing a book in a rant 😀
Best of all... my son went into the family business and now we 'talk shop'!
It has been an amazing ride!1 -
Fuck Java because java is one of the worst first languages you could pick. In the following I’ll highlight two main issues. One issue, the complexity of Java, will make life more difficult for you immediately, and the other, the danger of developing myopia regarding programming languages and their capabilities, has the potential to hurt you for many years to come and possibly your entire career9
-
I had mentioned before I got offered a new role, with 50% increase.
I wasn’t expecting my current employer to counter, but they suddenly shat themselves and basically matched the salary, and offered promotion to software developer (sans junior). They acknowledge my role within the company is only increasing in responsibility and so far I have exceeded expectations. Its a nice response to have from them, although I do wonder how long it might have taken without the panic.
The new company have counter-countered, promising to raise salary by a further 20% of total, within the first 6 months, provided I learn React reasonably quickly (about a month), integrate with the team and start to take on my roles within the Agile set relatively independently (3-6 months). They also don’t bother with the junior role title at these pay bandings.
I currently get about half an hour a week with my lead dev on sticking issues. In this new team, I would be one of ten javascripters, working towards best practices, TDD etc. This is absolutely the realm I want to specialise in, at the first stage of my career.
I said I would stay with my current employer, before the counter counter move. Now I am full of doubt.
Has anyone landed in teams like this, only to find they didn’t offer increased learning at all? If that was a high risk for me, I wouldnt take it, despite the offer of more cash. I’d sooner get more skilled in the stuff I have been working in at my current role.
Pretty amazing how much amazing life experiences can cause anxiety. Never been in the middle of a bidding war before...13 -
Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.
iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.
After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.
When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.
iPhone actually cured me.
MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.
Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.
I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.
iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.
True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.
I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.
Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.
Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.
Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.
Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.
It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.
Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.
Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.
Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.
Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.
Before I switched, I defended Linux.
My life was a lie.
I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.33 -
!rant
I am continuously transforming from being terrified to being sad to being tensed at the moment.Don't know what depression is , but i guess this is not a right phase .
Am just an average guy trying to get my confidences up as a good person/student/professional/whatever. last to last semester when I joined college for a cse degree, i had entered with the brightest face and the biggest smile because of just one thought: "this is where i belong, this is what i want" . i always got excited when i saw little things jumping around in my mobile , calculations being performed instantly, and the day i got my laptop, i knew i want to know every thing of how virtuality works.
I never cared about social life tho, i was a universally lonely introvert single child. Had 2-3 friends in school, who i don't care about much,a lost crush , a great group of home buddies and some friends here and there.
So when i started college i went there with multiple goals: making my career there, finding gud buddies, love again and many more..
But recently, everything is changing: realised that college is a piece of shit, people are always selfish and exploiting, a race is always going on where people are secretly running and you gotta learn by yourself.
So here is the current me: college attendance 37%, not went to gym past 1 week, human interaction last 2 days :2(mum nd dad), whatsapp last message: 4 days ago,sleep timings 10am to 6pm(daytimes lol), currently working on: this project that I took as "my last project that on completing means i know Android,and could code every fucked up app in the market)", which isn't yet completed bcz every-time i learn something in it, i realise their is one more part of the course am following , but i should know because this is useful.
And that makes me more sad :/1 -
Software Development Process
0. I can't fix this
1. Crisis of confidence
2. Questions career
3. Questions life
4. Oh it was a typo, cool
*Not my original content, but it made me smile and I need one more point on this uncomfortably hot day2 -
**random rant**
So next week I have a technical interview with TripleByte and I'm supposed to spent the next 2 days sorta preparing. Just woke up and had this thought tho:
What's the point? Yes I think I could try to get a better job but been trying for years (banking tech area) but now it feels like I'm at a "local optimum" sort of a sweet spot. Team/company could be smarter/more efficient but...
I've got my own place in a city that's also near NYC. It takes me 20 minutes to get to my current office, fairly flexible with the 9-5 work day, I can work remotely. I get enough money.
And then finding a new job === technical interviews about stuff you will rarely use and usually with no feedback like a pass-fail test where they only tell you if you pass or fail (and for me it always feels skewed towards fail the moment i walk since I'm deaf).
But at this point, I feel more like "you need to convince me to work for you". In my head, the plan is mostly to just have a nice chat and wing the technical questions just to see how good i am without any prep (i.e. poring thru Cracking the Coding Interview or Big O concepts, sorting...).2 -
Hi guys some advice would be appreciated.
I’m new here but have followed for a long time. I enjoy coding in my spare time, particularly web development but I am looking to make it my career.
Currently I work in mental health as a social worker, but ultimately the stress of the job and life in general has led to me being detained in a psychiatric hospital. So I’ve decided I need change.
I want to start a career I want to be in and that is as a developer. In terms of education, I started a degree in maths/cs a long time ago but stopped due to life events at the time. All the rest of my qualifications are around social work.
I’ve been doing my best to learn with Udemy and free code camp. Mainly looking at JavaScript. I also used to work in a charity where I did some (bad) php development and front end work.
Are there any self made developers out there who have any advice for me? I’m looking at doing a bootcamp but dunno if that will help at all.
Any help or advice would be really welcome. Cheers guys :)23 -
Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.
A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.
In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.
These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.
The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.
Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.
When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.
After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.
This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it. -
I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:
1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.
2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.
3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.
4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.
5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.
6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.
7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.
8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.
9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.
10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.
Except…
Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.
11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.
Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.
Two cents.1 -
The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".
Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".
Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.
The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.
There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.
One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.
This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.
For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.
On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.
I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.
Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story. -
I think I used to identify myself heavily by my work, career and so felt very dissatisfied I wasn't living up to my potential and getting the chances I deserved. I just couldn't get my dream job...
But now it feels like I've sorta split into Work and Life. Work does whatever is needed to pay the bills and is pretty satisfied now. Still gotta deal with monkeys but maybe devRant has helped provide an outlet to unleash the stress... and maybe sorta made it fun...
But Life juggles among different things, some time wasters, but seems now not so coding heavy anymore unless it's really inspired. And doesn't like putting aside time to prepare for interviews anymore or even actively seek out the latest tech news...
I sorta forgot what I was saying but does anyone else feel they used to have one identity but now split into 2 or more?
Actually I think this is what triggered it. Read this awhile ago but suddenly had this thought in my mind...
http://businessinsider.com/jeff-bez...1 -
Because of my personal life my career life is failing.My Girlfriend getting married to a "null pointer" by next month and I can't concentrate on any of my stuff. I have started a startup recently I am scared of losing it.2
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I work full time in the data protection field for healthcare whilst investing all my free time into coding as a career change.
I've discovered that despite people telling you how much you need to spend every hour you get free to learn to code, you also need to consider the people closest to you. I was ignoring my partner who I live with because I thought this was more important and that she should be able to see that. But what's the point in being in a relationship if you aren't making an effort with each other?
It's OK to slow down and invest time into the people you have in your life. Give yourself a break. -
Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.
My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.
We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."
As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".
His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.
But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...
Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.8 -
This is not a happy rant...
Got a new well paying job. Moving up in life. But my wife is not in the same place... She had quite a few career struggles and just lost her current job... It wasn't even a job she went to school for, just whatever she could find...
Now she's getting quite depressed. Luckily she's not envious at me, but does keep saying how lucky she is to have me.
I really want to help her somehow, but this is really a thing I just don't know how... And it just looks like she's not handling it too well. Joking about suicide and crying about being useless... She also keeps saying that all she can do now is be a housewife. We did seek out help for her. But still... I really want to give her better support. I feel useless here.18 -
!rant
I think that more than learning about CS, I learned how to cope with enormous amounts of frustration that comes with being a dev and I also felt great when I was being challenged with actual deadlines through exams, hackathons, assignments, practicals and tough professors.
Professionally, I think the great knowledge of fundamentals of CS helps a lot and it is just a great way to get your foot inside the door (for internship interviews and career opportunities) of a company and then show what you're made of when it comes to being a dev.
Also, I had the time of my life because I was around like-minded people who loved the same things and it was good to watch them suffer at first and then, watch them succeed at something that I was about to do. -
Monday marks the beginning of a new month. In the new month, I turn a year older. As I steer further and further away from "youthfulness", I intend on starting a new chapter in my life.
Sunday 28th Feb is the last day I put any investment towards my "white-collar" professional career. Beginning March 1st, all my energy is going towards my entrepreneurial career instead.
This means that instead of learning that Huawei HCIA networking certification that I hate, I'm going to continue learning Docker (then Kubernetes) which I intend to use on my first product & the many more to come. Instead of studying the horrifyingly boring Data Science course, I'm instead going to put my energy behind understanding GCP & AWS, with the hopes of eventually getting certified.
Basically, I'm going to put all my energy into learning technologies that interest me AND have the potential to help me deliver on my entrepreneurial journey faster & better, rather than studying certifications which everyone believe will make me more employable.
Unfortunately, there aren't that many jobs going around & I'm currently under a year long internship with extremely smart graduates (a valedictorian included). The joke is we're earning $250 a month and have zero hope of getting employed anytime soon. I'm tired of going down this path.
I'm glad I got my degree in CS, now onto creating job opportunities for my fellow peers!
PS: Expect rants about my entrepreneurship challenges, and celebrations about my entrepreneurship wins!2 -
I was asked to revisit some code yesterday - code that I had written at a much better time in my life. I was productive, I was on top of my project and we were delivering value to the organization.
I'm at a point now where I haven't written any code for months. I've been documenting and designing and arguing with teammates over inane shit. It's been an absolute slog, and I've started looking at what it would take for me to actually quit since I've got a kid on the way, and I've been bringing the stress and anxiety home from work. I've got so much money in options and salary, it's basically impossible for me to leave for better work.
I'd consider this the lowest point in my professional career. Four years of college - where I beat alcoholism and depression (mostly) only to end up at a place that I fucking hate, but cannot leave. It's affecting my family. I've drank more in the past 6 months than I have in my entire life.
And now I have to start repurposing old code to work on a new project that is fucked up 5 ways from Sunday. I honestly don't know how much further I can stretch my professional ethics to keep this shitload of cash flowing into my savings.3 -
Advices looking for a job in Canada as a foreign?
I've been a software developer for 4 years now. I started in small company in Rome as jr developer where I'm now the CTO... I now feel stuck in this job cause the company makes a lot of money from the core product and there is no room for innovation.
I was looking for a drastic change in my life and career and Canada seems a good place to me.
So, any advices?9 -
Game title: Vacations of an engineering student.
Aim: to utilize 60 days of freedom with something worth useful in future career.
Game Modes: (1) Sit at home. (2) intern for some company
Mode(1) Sit at home.
>>Villains : Games,Netflix and movies, food, friend parties, late night sleeps, afternoon wake ups, trips (random villains)
>>Boss Battles : laziness, procrastination, loosing of interest in stuff you wanna do
>>reward on completion: more knowledge increase, better resume ,$0 earnings
Mode(2) : intern for some company
>> extra level before starting : apply for 100s of companies,interview rounds, test
>>villans : no self choice, work with shitty code, too much workload, less time for outside-work life
>> Boss battles: do stuff that you didn't agree to, less stipend, unwanted scoldings from boss
>> reward on completion : more work experience , lesser knowledge, more $
What would be your mode of playing this summer?3 -
A tech as well as a life question (actually more of a useless sleepless thought) : What do you think is more important? Exposing yourself to multiple technologies, career paths and life experiences or diving deep into a single technology, career path and life experience?
I feel like being an expert in 1 tech might pay off in terms of job life , and it would be bad for a person who is constantly switching between career paths, but sometimes i feel like i should have tried other paths too. Not just the life of a techie, like people who are deep into media and journalism, accountancy or those film industry jobs ; politics or finances , etc.
Its like, we found an apple to be a tasty fruit and now we have to be the apple guy forever. The better i am in being the apple guy, the more i will have to eat apples and the more i will earn. Why can't i try pears or oranges?7 -
How about being laid off over a 5min video call one morning when you completely didn’t suspect it? 😅 At least that taught me a valuable lesson about all these fuckin companies early on in my tech career! Watch me never prioritize their bs over work/life balance haha
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I'm 22 years old and 1.5 years into my first Startup Job. (and second Dev job)
I feel kind of uncomfortable now and I would like to ask your opinions.
I'll start with the work related description of my situation and later add a bit of my life situation.
I develop as hobby since I can think. I'm pretty engaged and love to do things right. So I quickly found myself in the position of the de-facto lead fullstack Developer.
Although, to be clear, were only a few devs - which are now replaced by not so many other devs. I feel often like the only person able to design and decide and implement in a way that won't kill us later (and I spend half of my time fixing technical debt).
I mostly like what I do , because it's a challenge and I feel needed. I learn new things and I am pretty flexible in work time. (but I also often work till late in the night, sacrificing friendship time)
But there are so many things I would love to do and used to do, but now I have no motivation to develop outside of my job.
I don't really feel that what my company is doing is something I find valuable. (Image rights management)
I earn pretty well - in comparison to what I'm used to: 20€/hour, Brutto 2.800 / month for 32 hours a week. In Berlin. (Minus tax and stuff it's 1.800€). It's more than enough for what I need.
But when I see what others in similar positions earn (~4.000), I feel weird. I got promised a raise since nearly a year now. I don't feel I could demand it. I also got the hint that I could get virtual shares. But nothing happened.
Now what further complicates the situation is that I will go to Portugal in April for at least half a year, for joining a social project I love. My plan used to be that I work from there for a few hours a week - but I'm starting to hesitate as I fear that I will actually work more and it will keep me from fully being there.
So, I kind of feel emotionally attached - I like (some of) the people, I know (or at least believe) that the company will have a big problem without me. (I hold a lot of the knowledge for legacy applications) .
But I also feel like I'm putting too much of myself into the company and it is not really giving me back. And it's also not so much worth it... Or is it?
Should I stick to the company and keep my pretty secure position and be financially supported during my time in Portugal, while possibly sacrificing my time there?
Should I ask for a raise (possibly even retroactively) and then still quit later? (they will probably try to get my 1 month of cancelation period upped to 3).
Also, is this a risk for my "career"?question work-life what? purpose startup safety hobby work-life balance life career career advice bugfixing7 -
The start of a new chapter of career life...
Until now, I always saw myself as the base raiser... but raising the base is not what everyone else on my team wants...
Only took me 3 years to realize... so I guess time to just fall in line...
I guess it's why some smart people act dumb on the job... It's just easier to blend in...18 -
TL;DR: I have some rambly shit to say...
Update on the Uni stuff: I think I got a pass in all the subjects. Two exams left but I am holding on. It's a big deal to me since last year I could barely do a single subject per semester - a subject I had failed a few times because of lack of interest and good ol' depression. Anyways, I persisted with that subject, got my Bachelor's in Food Technology and now I'm doing that Master's of mine... It probably looks wild to people here that I did that switch but I have always had a relationship with computers as long as I remember myself. So it's not surprising that as soon as I got a choice in what I *actually* wanted to do I chose this kinda thing. But I do have to rant that it took me 10 fucking years to choose! And that I did not choose it before choosing food technology which I will probably never use anyways. I wasted so much of my energy and time on that. I did elect programming as one of the subjects while doing food tech but I really should have moved to something else. But oh well. Guess I had to find out the hard way.
For all those reading, this is what it looks like when you're 30, have very little experience in doing programming for anything else than academics and are doing a major career switch through studies after struggling for 10 years with a 4-year Bachelor's. But such is life.
Also a bit off topic but I just cannot handle people not telling what they mean because of the inability or lesser ability to tell what that is in the first place.
I can't deal with the fact of how fucked human societies are. I just can't. I am way too nice for it. So I listen to stuff like true crime to really get a feel of how evil people can be. I know it's ~problematic~ or whatever, but to me it is a way of engaging with the lesser spoken side of human beings.
And maybe, just maybe, I should get checked for ADHD again because I feel like despite my therapy for depression, nothing really has changed with the ADHD symptoms I was diagnosed with. And maybe for autism since people have labelled me that way and it might explain some stuff... All that is to say I need some good mental care. And this society is shit for it. Hell, apparently one of the psychologists I was under the care of thought depression resulted from ungratefulness. All this while I was legit being abused. But that abuse has stopped now that I found a psychologist that is actually standing up for me. I just mourn for all the time I spent being depressed and how it fucked my memory and stuff. How much it affected me and all. I have no idea why I'm being this vulnerable but it feels somewhat fitting... How do you cope with being 30 and not remembering almost all your life? What you remember being what you managed to write down or has been negative enough it stuck in the brain for forever...
Just why am I fucking supposed to be all happy and shit when I am just tired of life because it is too goddamn much? I have no real reason to look forward to things, online friends and the offline one included. Because ultimately, I have no damn motivation to look forward to anything, really. I am supposedly doing better but in reality I am just getting better at going through the motions. The therapy, while mindblowingly effective, is not actually addressing the core cause of everything and just expecting me to fake it till I make it. And this is me saying that about CBT. Why should I have to tell myself things just to feel human? I am one and as long as I'm alive, nothing will change that. So why do I have to always feel like an alien wherever I am? So out of touch with myself that I don't have a self image or an ability to even tell what the actual fuck I want from life... I am getting better with the latter, but still. It hurts. I wanna shed so many tears but I'm frustratingly unable to do so.
I am just a human trying to human in this ocean of 8 billion humans. Maybe I will find some more connections, maybe I won't.
I wanna end this rambling session by a few things:
1. I will have to go to Canada at some point this year to see my in-laws and some other family over there...
2. I will probably have to seek a job there (for financial reasons it is much better for me to have one there and to work remotely in Georgia) and I have no idea of where to start since I am not the greatest material for it.
3. Life is going alright-ish.
4. I will hear from the startup company at some point this month.
5. I have plans for my future but no idea if they will ever come true at this point.
6. My family arrangement will have to change in more ways than one.
7. I should resume my unofficial first music album and engage in creative stuff because at the core, I have a need to do so.
8. Do I really have to do Duolingo again? I really want to not forget German and Russian, but I just never have practice. And Duolingo is surprisingly easy to forget to do for me.
The end.3 -
!!!Question here!!!
I am enrolled in a full time course (bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering), currently in second year, will be in third by June 2017, and I have a job offer from a Japan Based Company, so it legal to do the job while being enrolled in a full-time course? Also, if I drop from the course and focus on job, so will that be good?
The package is really good, but the degree is important (at-least in India), I want to know about other parts of the world also.
I am inclined towards joining the job, but then it frightens me as the culture here is (degree is important, talent is not!), but I have faith in myself, after watching many motivational videos on youtube, I feel like following my passion, but then I need to be practical as well.
What to do, what not to do? I need your help, please let me know what are your views?4 -
My sis wants to career switch into being a dev.
Sis is a kindergarden teacher (great credentials, went through a rigorous program for all the best certs), divorced last year, has a 5 year old. She's a single mom making less than 30k, in Portland, OR -- not great. She's also just started her career/finished school this past year.
Trouble is, sis can be a bit unrealistic about plans at first. She "heard from some people" about making 50k+ starting wage after a coding boot camp. She wants to do this by the end of the summer -- she's never coded in her life.
I can't advise her; I'm in my undergrad c++ courses and I don't know the industry, but my gut tells me this is a bad idea.
Please advise.8 -
During my commute to home from office, I got an idea about an app that I really needed and it could be built easily. And I couldn't wait to get home and start building it ... I was super excited...( You know the feeling when you are so clear about what you are going to do that you start to think in code )
Now it has been half an hour since I am stuck on this error , looking at my screen , pulling my hair while sitting on a chair in the posture of a f*cking question mark! Thinking about why I did I even choose to do this for a living , I could have sold vegetables and be happier.
This is just beginning of my career , is this how I am going to spend rest of my life?14 -
- Remake all my hacky products and finally make those adjustments and improvements I always forget about. (A shitton of maintenance that I always YOLO my way through)
- Potentially finally give digital drawing and design a go as a second career (if money permits, also)
- Move to middle of Asia, dead center of Kazakhstan or wherever there are gypsy tribes, learn their language and teach their kids about computers and robots and make a lot of products that'd make a gypsy's life easier. Or rather, create a modern gypsy life that does not override their traditional ways, rather integrates with it. (This is one of my dreams, which I know will never come true. Gypsies and nomads do settle more and more each year and their culture is basically going extinct. Plus, govts around the world dislike them greatly)
- Do a lot more research projects in robotics. Literally make everyday robotic items and then sell them. (with a sprinkle of AI/ML, that is)
All the above would also need lots of money and effort tho. -
I think that the most inspiring moment in my life, at least when it comes to programming, was the moment I realized that, that thing standing next to my desk isn't just a black box of black magic. It's a black box of black magic I can harness. That I can use my knowledge and my will to create stuff. Not only for my entertainment, but things that are actually useful and helpful to others.
This thought helped me decide to pursue career in IT. -
My AP Computer Science teacher changed my life in 2001. Until then, I wasn’t considering a career in development. He challenged me to write a back propagating multi layer perceptron neural network, and an RPN calculator. Every day made me think about how to solve problems at an algorithmic level. He was brutally honest, and one of the reasons why I’m an team manager now. RIP, your legacy won’t be forgotten.5
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I started Aeronautical Engeneering (yes I know, but I love Aviation). In second semester I saw Basic Programming, and then I realized that I had an ability in programming (comparing to my other fellows).
In third semester I was in "Static" class (vectors and a lot of physics) and I thought: "WTF am doing here, I don't know what can I do with a vector in real life." So I decided to switch to Systems Engeneering in other university (I think it had been always in my blood haha).
I saw one semester and this happened: I loved the career, but the university had an old-educational method that i hated. So i moved to another university, and I'm currently finishing at distance.
I'm just tired of university. I realized that the university is about 30%. The other 70% is experience (and of course a little from Stack Overflow hahaha).
Now, thanks to a lot of Google research and experience in various self projects, I'm here in Brazil working as a Web Developer.
I've learned 1000% more here than in the university.
And that's my short-four-years-story7 -
Playing around with GW-BASIC on an old 286 when I was maybe 8 I knew that I would spend my life programming. It was magic. It's less magic now, but I know I will not run out of challenges in my life or career, and that's pretty good too :)
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Magento Debugging Horror!
Changing lots of things in magento with no problem. Continuing development for quite sometime. Suddenly decide to clear cache to see affect of a change on a template in frontent. Suddenly magento crashes! There's no error message. No exception log. No log in any file anywhere on the disk. All that happens is that magento suddenly returns you to the home page!
Reverting all the changes to the template. Clear the cache. Nope! Still the same! Why? Because the problem has happened somewhere in your code. Magento just didn't face it, because it was using an older version of your code. How? Because magento 2 even caches code! Not the php opcache. Don't get me wrong. It has it's own cache for code, in a folder called generated. Now that you cleared all the caches including this folder, you just realized that, somewhere something is wrong. But there is no way for you to know where as there is absolutely no exception logged anywhere!
So you debug the code, from index.php, down to the deepest levels of hell. In a normal php code, once the exception happens, you should see the control jumps to an exception handler, there, you can see the exception object and its call stack in your debugger. But that's not the case with magento.
Your debugger suddenly jumps to a function named:
write_close();
That's all. No exception object. No call stack. No way to figure out why it failed. So you decide to debug into each and every step to figure out where it crashes. The way magento renders response to each request is that, it calls a plugin, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin, which calls a list of plugins, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin.....
And if in each step, just by accident, instead of step through, you use the step over command of your debugger, the crash happens suddenly and you end up with the same freaking write_close() function with no idea what went wrong and where the error happened! You spend a whole day, to figure out, that this is actually a bug in core of magento, they simply introduced after your recent update of magento core to the latest STABLE version!!! It was not your mistake. They ruined their own code for the thousandth of time. You just didn't notice it, because as I said, you didn't clear the `generated` folder, therefore using an older version of everything!
Now that after spending 7 hours figuring out what has failed with absolutely no standard way of debugging and within a spaghetti of GOTO commands (Magento calls them plugin), why not report it to github? So you report it with a pull request. This also takes 1 hour of your time. Just to next day get informed that your pull request is rejected because another person already fixed the bug and made the same pull request. It was just not on the latest stable version yet!
So you decide to avoid updating magento as much as possible. Because you know that the next Stable version will make your life and career unstable. But then the customer complains that the Admin Panel is warning him of using old Magento version which might pose SECURITY THREATS! -
is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?
i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :
1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.
2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.
3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .
4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too
compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)
2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.
3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.
4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.
as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.
this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.
this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?
in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?
Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/
mann i want some people skills like these guys10 -
Thanks for your email and any other information you have a great time and consideration of this email in the end the game and the rest of my life and death and resurrection I am not able and willing I am not a good time and I have to be able to do the same time and effort and I am going through my resume to the inbox to be in a career change it back on track with you to see the profile photo album and a couple weeks...
When you just click through the autocomplete...4 -
I don't know if someone has noticed but I haven't been on DevRant lately. It's not that the community is awesome. In the last month or two, I've had a blast of an experience here. I've just been avoiding screens, specifically texts in screens. I think something snapped on my head last week. Here's why:
As I've said in other rants/comments, I study history, and at the moment, I haven't found any career that has to read more than this one. Sometimes I've had to read about 1200 pages in less than three days. Last week I had to read 6 books which accounted for about 3500 pages. I was actively reading more than 600 pages a day. Now, this was for an investigation, and each of these reads had to be properly summarised with their respective arguments, thesis, etc. So I intensely read everything before Thursday, the day in which I had to present my work, in which I referenced about 10 books.
Apart from that, daily, I spent 4 hours coding. That's been the minimum I've done daily since I started learning.
I wasn't too tired. I'm used to read a lot, and coding is always fun. But the problem came in Friday when I woke up with a strange headache that spanned from my eyes to the back of my ears. Hurting especially on the sides of my forehead.
It eventually dissipated, but whenever I read something, the ache slowly came back. Loud noises and bright lights also brought it back. So you could imagine, everytime I tried to read a Rant, comment, etc, the headache came back. The same for coding and reading. For fucks sake I feel like I'm fucking crippled.
And no, the pain isn't the worst. Pain is pain and you can't do anything about it. The worst is that I'm developing some anxiety here. In all this time I have been learning daily nonstop. Coding was something I craved for everyday. Now I'm fucking wasting entire days in non-productive activities. I'm losing my fucking time here guys!
I'm afraid I have some anxiety problem with time. I've already fucking wasted entire years, now I don't want to continue wasting them and push my goals further away, I want to get to my goals as soon as I can because time and life can't be stopped and once time is lost, you can't fucking get it back. And, considering I'm still 21, I do notice this feeling is somehow irrational, but for fucks sake, I'm wasting fucking LIFE :( -
Just want to rant about my current struggle and look for some advice.
I was never encouraged to explore and cultivate my interests in my life before college, and my family kept pressuring me to achieve academic excellence in the past.
Only until I got into my current liberal art college last year, I was able to do what I like: Art and programming.
Everything was moving forward smoothly so far, but when I started to apply for internship, I found myself in a very awkward situation: companies who offer interns prefer students who're concentrated in cs or art, but not both. And as you might guess, they require personal projects which I barely have time to do besides my school work.
Sometimes I wonder if studying in liberal art college is a good idea... I can't imagine myself competing with CS guys from universities...Or art students from design schools like RISD.
I really like both fields, yet Im still struggling with my future career decisions.1 -
#justAthought
I was recently playing max payne 2 on my pc when this colleague of mine comes up and boasts "You playing max payne now?? I have completed this game so many times, even in the hard mode. Which mode are you playing in" (I was playing easy -.- )
But then it struck me. how cool it would have been, if we had a chance to take a decision at some point of our life , to continue the next phase in easy medium or hard mode. The harder the mode, the bigger the prize, but its not that you are suffering by the consequences of taking easy mode.
Like take college for example. Instead of companies deciding the quality of a candidate based on popularity of their college, they would take based on the mode of education they took for various subjects.
- The education mode system would be something like this: at the end of 6 month an exam will happen as usual
- the easy mode of exam will have just the lighter , more basic syllabus and lenient checking .
- the medium mode will have slightly more research based questions from the a more standard version of the previous syllabus and unbiased checking .
- the hard mode will have deep knowledge requirement professional questions and strict checking.
- students willing to dedicate heavy time to their choice of subject will then have better opportunities at big companies, making a fair ground for all.
- student more focused on non academic/ specific topics could take easy mode for most of the subjects, and focus on the career of their choice. They will still have a backup to apply for jobs requiring knowledge of certain subjects , but for lower wages( since they took the easy mode for those subjects they would be learning the required knowledge in the company, working as proxys/junior devs)
what do you think?3 -
For the game devs out there … Is following a game developer career a good idea ? We always hear about crunch and no work life balance. Im thinking about changing my job( currently a dev at a fintech company) for a while and need some insights from you guys :)6
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Has anyone had an actual career (something you could support yourself/family on for the span of your life) before development? Curious as to how people got into development.
An example is I have a colleague who was some sort of construction supervisor and managed to get into development someone.6 -
I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.
My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.
apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.
- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.
- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.
- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain
- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :
--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)
- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev
- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company
- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.
- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)
- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.
- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.
- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)
- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/13 -
First rant! I'm currently on my first actual dev job and I've been learning a ton, doing extra studying/side projects in my free time and office environment is decent with good colleagues!
BUT
1) I'm getting paid about half as much as someone on my level (education and experience considered) - partly my fault, but thought experience would outweight the shit pay, now I'm really starting to question this bullshit
2) I'm away from all my friends, and by the end of my contract, 90% of them would have graduated... Have no friends outside of work where I live, and any social life I had, died when I moved
3) My work project is fucking tedious and could be flipped upside down to be of actual use, but no, company can't change how they've done things for the past 1000 years. But who gives a flying fuck about junior's suggestions, I haven't got decades of experience to back my ideas, plain logic and industry feedback isn't enough
4) Programming 24/7 for months is doing no favours to my hobbies, as I'm either too tired to do anything, or I don't have the time
5) The piece of shit library that I HAVE to use (because alternative has no support, lacks basic documention, the usual...) is built so that any automation that my project is meant to provide, is next to impossible to achieve, so day-to-day I'm just spitting in the wind as I'm slowly falling behind schedule
Quitting isn't really an option, as I'd have to find a job with significantly higher pay, really quickly to benefit from leaving... which is next to impossible
So here I am, stuck between frustration with aspects of my life and being contempt with other half (the learning and programming as a career)...
Is this something that will stay with me throughout my career/life? Or is it simply a shitty-entry-level situation out of which I'll grow out of?5 -
Software development process:
0. I can't fix this
1. Crisis of confidence
2. Questions career
3. Questions life
4. Oh it was a typo, cool -
You ever wake up and realize it's 10 am and you wanted to be in the office at 8 and for a moment you question your entire career and every single life choice you made?9
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Hello wonderful people out there, I need some career advice and would really appreciate your help in deciding. I am sure you have perspectives and opinions that may not even have crossed my mind.
I am a Full Stack Dev with 9 years of experience. I got two overseas opportunities, one in Bucharest, Romania and the other one in Mississauga, Canada.
Now according to my research:
+ives in Romania:
> Role is good
> Low cost of living
> Money is good and company also provides 2 bed accommodation
> Access to Europe
> Is approx 8 hours far away from my country of origin
-ives in Romania (just as per my internet research when compared to Canada)
> Healthcare is not the great
> Scores low on standard of life and quality index
> Not sure I can think of settling down there
+ives in Canada
> No Language barriers
> Ample amount of opportunities in the long run
> Can strongly think of settling down there
> Scores really high in standard of life and quality index
> Strong healthcare and education system
-ives in Canada
> Living expenses are fuckin high
> Money initially is not that great and won't be able to save enough for my future goals
> Is approx 28 Hours far from my country of origin
Which one would you choose and if you can please mention why?11 -
I graduated college with double degrees in literature and marketing management. Web and software development and design was a hobby that became my way of life and eventual career path. I guess it's more of a challenge than a hurdle, not having a formal IT education as a foundation, but I'm happy to have learned a lot from my colleagues over the years to better myself as a dev in practice, if not in academics.4
-
!rant
I don't know about you, but I keep trying to push myself into learning new stuff and studying the hardest jobs to do in IT, but I currently work as web developer and find myself loving what I do...
So I was thinking for a moment: why keep trying to have a great carrier and earning lots of money, having a nice car and a hot tub? Why not just working in a small company or as a freelance and do what I really enjoy without the headache?
But then I fear that I would depress because I would never know my limits, what I could do with my life... I fear that I would regret not having reached the top. Not the top of the world, but the top of myself.... Because if you know what you CAN'T do, then you can rest with a smile on your face.
Don't you think the?
Sorry for the long post, I'm high as fuck!4 -
Found myself in a career predicament.
I’m currently working at a tech startup and it really does have the potential to really take off.
But recently the CEO has taken compressed working and remote working off the table for the most part which at this stage in my life is quite important.
Today I was offered a position at a different company with 4/5 days a week with a 10% pay increase.
Now the time has come to make a decision and I really don’t know what to do because I’m pretty sure the worst thing for me to do is make the wrong choice and end up kicking myself in a years time.
Was wondering if any of y’all have had to make a similar choice in your career7 -
TL;DR: I'm losing touch with reality and relatability and I am seeing it happen to me.
Context: As a dev, as we all do, I started with a low salary and was poor for the first 4 years of my career. I used to take pride in my poverty and because of it I faced difficulties in life.
Somehow because of that (and drugs), it gave me a fun personality and I was able to crack jokes about it and laugh it off. I was fun at parties.
But now, with moderate struggle, things are much better for me. I'm a YouTuber, I have clients and a full time job and I end up making the salary from just one client what I used to make in 2018 from a full-time office job.
Now, when anyone jokes about being poor and struggling, although I can still laugh with them, I pity them. I feel they are not working hard enough (even though I'm aware that I don't know their story, so it's a bad judgement and unfair).
I can no longer relate to my past self.
For me, I get sad about myself that I still don't have enough, while knowing I have more than what I could ask for.
I know this is not a good thing to happen to me, but it feels like I'm helpless. Sigh, I'm becoming a boomer aren't I?2 -
I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.
I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).
I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.
- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience
However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.
I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.
What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.
This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid3 -
Internship/Career Question
I was able to get a referral for a software engineering internship at a company I like this summer. This will be my first “real-life” internship and I’m super excited.
The referral ended up getting me an interview with the company’s “Principal Talent Attraction Consultant”.
What show I expect for this meeting? Is it possible that there is a whiteboarding part of this interview? Or would it be more general?
Lmk if I’m being too vague. Thanks guys!3 -
So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.
TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!
Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".2 -
This is my keyboard. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My keyboard is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my keyboard is useless. Without my keyboard, I am useless.
I can't believe how long I've had this one keyboard. I started my software developer career with it (went to my first coding interview with it), bought it before I had even had sex... Best investment of my life so far :D16 -
How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?
Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.
We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).
My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.
My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.
Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?
P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.6 -
I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)
I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table
Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.
Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.
Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.
All of the above pay the same salary.
Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).
On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.
On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.
I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.
Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.
I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.8 -
Oh guys >.> I was so excited when I have been hired in new company. Sooo excited...but that fallen like a house of cards, after hard reality of poor quality onboarding. I got computer after 2 weeks of work, accesses to repo and databases after 1.5 months, first commit after 2 month... support from teammates 3/10, nobody had time for me, or they told me few words without full context. My first task have been refactoring of module. Okay...but nobody had full config for this app. It had 275 bundles but more than 70 didn’t work. Well...okay I tried my best... okay...last month and few task later (nobody could tell me how that system really work)... and now it’s fourth month...this one is the last one... enough of this bullshit for me :/ I’m out. Next month will be better, new job new me. I lost 4 months of my life...
Did you have some sort of that situation in your career? How common it is? -
I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.
I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...
At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.
This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.
So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.
Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.
I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.
It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.
I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).
We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.
I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.
But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.
So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.
So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.
Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:
- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.
- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.
So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.
So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.
I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.
I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.
After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time. -
One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,
Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.1 -
Nothing much to ready today, keep scrolling..
I just asked you to keep scrolling, I am using this space to think out loud...
Damn you bloody rebel.. whatever..
Finally after a rough week, festivals, interviews, work stress, and pending tasks, I got a free weekend for myself to be with myself.
I managed to do bare minimum at work. My new line manager isn't quite pleased with how team and I am functioning but whatever.
On Fridays, I usually end the day early and start with personal tasks. I managed to finish some long pending activities.
Today, I was able to do a deep cleaning of digital housekeeping. Sorted some clashes with parents. manage to de-stress and relax my stiff neck muscles.
Apart from that I guess, I am all prepared to interview and get hired for a company on foreign land. I am confident that I can relocate to EU.
And for now, I am actively pursuing two of my hobbies, Music and Finances. I love managing my finances and learning more about technical aspects of audio and listening to more and more music.
I feel happier, relaxed, and calm. Having things under control is such a wonderful feeling.
And I am slowly building a framework to earn, manage, invest, and grow my finances. It's turning out really well. I have setup the base infrastructure.
For music, I have figured the fundamentals and now I will go out buy myself an DAC/AMP to build a portable rig.
This shit is so awesome and makes me happy. I am able to socialise at the end of each day so that keeps me going during the lock-down phase.
I have figured the top key and important things to do at work for my profile and I actually enjoy those.
1. Product discovery - talking to users/customers and finding their pain areas and opportunities to build the solution
2. Product vision/strategy - Dreaming on how the product would evolve and laying out a solid plan to materialise those dreams.
3. Roadmap and prioritisation - this should be self explanatory
4. Success metrics - I really want to get into data and I am getting opportunities to do so. This is super fun. This will help me analyse and show the impact of the what we are building and measuring it while making sure that LT recognises my and my teams' efforts.
I want to and I will excel these 4 keys skills of my profile and be more efficient at my job.
This will give me more time to pursue my hobbies (which will change over time and want to enjoy them the most while I am at them).
Guys, after a rough 2021, the end of the year seems promising with a lot of leaves and short vacation coming up.
Apart from all this, what is more important here is that I got the career and life clarity that I was struggling with for past few months.
For whoever has read till here, YOU ARE BLOODY AWESOME and thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me always.
I am grateful to be a part of this community and have awesome friends like you all who have been with me though my ups and downs since 2016.
LOVE YOU ALL :)3 -
!rant
Question to the devs that hire.
Would you hire a developer with the qualifications:
- knows multiple programming languages (can be any but knows them well)
- has worked the past 6 years in the field however worked during his school life.
- started of career in web development and worked with high end clients, (big corps, businesses, celebs)
- does not have a CS or Engineering Degree (has a different degree that is remotely related)
- has failed his A Level exams (pre-college, high school board exams by Cambridge) (not that this matters)
Disclaimer: This is not about me. I was in an argument with my extended family about the importance of grade school education in work. My family consists of Teachers and School Administrators entirely. The above point all define me and I was successful enough to earn more than what my family does early on when joining college. I did however fail my alevels only to get a scholarship in a great University for my field.5 -
Feel like shit, can't focus on work, exam coming up in about 2 weeks...
These stupid numerical algorithms are easy, and yet I manage to get stuck on every shitty little detail, I panic, and I completely lose focus.
This shit has been destroying my academic career... Can't focus properly anymore, cannot study even the simplest things - things that I used to do off the top of my head just a year ago.
My sleep schedule is FUBAR, it's a miracle if I manage to stick to the same timezone for three nights in a row.
Yet I'm still learning new things, trying out stuff and solving problems. Just not the ones that I need to pass my exams.
And before anyone says that university is useless and whatnot: I'm studying aerospace engineering.
I love it, I'm having great fun, learning amazing things, and I've met a lot of amazing people thanks to it. It's one of the few choices in life that I am certain of, and would gladly repeat over and over again.
I've burned myself out from stress, far harder and longer than I've ever done before, and I cannot figure out a way to recover from it.
I've been doing better in the last month or so, but I still cannot get any proper work done, and this is gonna bite me in the ass really hard, once again.
Funny story: I had 3 days of break between the end of the previous semester and the beginning of this one. 3 days of pure freedom.
In those 3 days, I spontaneously reverted to a normal sleep schedule (didn't even need an alarm clock) and felt like a mountain had been lifted off my shoulders.
A year ago I had no idea what truly panicking in the middle of an exam felt like.
My mind had never gone completely blank.
I had no idea what impaired cognitive ability felt like.
This shit is scary.
Why do our minds have to make things so complicated? -
I'm finishing my secondary school in a few months and I'm currently unsure what exactly to do after school.
I'm pretty sure I want to become a software developer (maybe frontend UX/UI focused) already but I'm unsure what path to pursue.
As I live in Germany I have the options of either vocational training or studying at a University.
I'm pretty fed up with theoretic work and school right now so I'm tending towards vocational training as it incorporates one or two days of school with working in a company for the rest of the week.
The issue is that I will complete my A levels and therefore be eligible for university education in most relevant courses and have the feeling of wasting possible success in my future career (and maybe life experiences) if I just do the
vocational training.
As most developers here have a long experience as devs I'd like to ask you for advice.
Would you suggest studying something like applied computer science etc. to achieve a successful software developer career and higher wages or is experience more important than higher formal education at university for a developer?4 -
Want your opinions on this one.
I am currently experiencing a slowdown in my career progression...trying to study for the RHCSA exam and I had interviews for two new positions in my current company, first job I reached the final interview but they went forth with another candidate.
For the second job they have not yet responded.
Anyways I was thinking of trying to complete my RHCSA since I already paid for the exam and then study for masters degree abroad and try to immigrate to a country with a better quality of life, thoughts?3 -
Self promotion:
I've just uploaded my first article to mine an my wife's collaborative arts/culture project blog --UDAGANuniverse.
I've lead a varied career path so far which has kept me closely connected with cutting edge tech in both creative & business environments. This introductory article serves as an introduction to the driving force behind what has motivated me down that path.
Check it out here if you'd like to read it!:
http://udaganuniverse.com/blog/4
Later articles will get into how I've incorporated coding into performance. I only touch on it in this post.
Saydyy (my wife) has also posted her introduction, which I'd highly recommend reading! She has lead an inspiring and incredible journey in her life and introduces herself and her earliest motivations in her writing.
Hope that you enjoy it! -
It started when life caught me off guard. It was one of those transition moment when you realized you are no longer a college student and you need to get a job.
I was clueless that time (still clueless - smh) that I didn't prepare my CV nor interviews. I got into panic mode and ask help from career service in my college (I rarely ask for help, and when I did that, I am really desperate).
Long story short, I got a job from the career service's connection. I don't think I did well in both the interview and technical test (of course, no prep or whatsoever, what do you expect?) but seems like we both in need of each other (maybe because my grades when I was in college is good... and maybe because my starting salary is low enough... and maybe because there was no better candidate at that moment) that I get picked.3 -
I use to have a very slow computer so i google search how to speed it
It came with a .bat script that refresh the ram, after that i wanted to know how that script had work.
And 11ish years later is my life and career
And, yeah, at that time i didn't care about security and why you shouldn't run a script without know what does it do 😅
Also, that script get lost forever in my broken old computer -
To those with more years of experience, can software development be a 9-5 career with (almost) no studying outside of work? I want to achieve that. I want it as a source of income and to spend my free time on my hobbies and with family. Is that even possible?
note:
I love programming by the way, I'm just tired of having it taking my whole life and I want to do other things before I die...6 -
Is quiting university because of obvious reasons to pursue a freelance web developer career a smart move?
I am just 21, sick of my teachers and environment and I feel that I would eventually fall into depression if I stay . I love to code, I dream code literally.
What are the long term consequences which I can't think of.
Devs please help me make a smart choice before I make biggest or smartest move of my life.
I am making just enough to sustain myself. Just Brought a MacBook air worth 1000k with little help from family.
Will not having a degree be an obstacle in my dev career.23 -
Don't really know if this is an appropriate question to throw on here but what the heck.
So I'm thinking about trying to look into the dating scene again. I'm in my late 20's and about a year away from graduating college so I figured I have the time to try it again. The thing is the last time I was dating I was a freshmen and I had been in a long term thing but it flat-lined a year ago. My life is different now and meeting people has changed too.
How does someone who's a career focused developer find someone in the dating pool post-college? For an FYI I've done mainstream sites like eHarmony with a moderate amount of success but nothing that really lasted beyond 2 meetups. (Meeting people at random locations for the sake of it has never been my thing so bars are sort of a non starter).
We love getting feedback, so I'd appreciate any I get from you guys. :) -
Honestly my worst career choice was due to the fact that I was severely dissatisfied with my life at the time, so I answered a recruiting email from LinkedIn.
The job sounded great on paper, the office was great, the interviewees were amazing, BUT at the end of the day it was so much less of a challenge than my current job that I was sick of it after 3 MONTHS (for reference, people who had worked there for 4 years and were seniors were asking me for help all the time at that point...on basic java problems...yeah..).
So my only advice when you get the itch to respond to a recruiter is definitely weight your options. Ask yourself "Am I really unhappy with my job, or is it something else?" because it can really save you a world of pain later on.
I got a different job thereafter, but it was sure embarrassing to run into my old boss at a party and he was like "how's the new gig" and I had already left...2 -
Just now I was talking to this young girl on her employment in the corporates. I asked her if she learned anything that allows her to deliver value to her organization. She said 'not much'. And she was actually learning the wrong things, and didn't get exposed to the proper tools to get the job done, and the fact that she wanted to take the offer to work overseas.
I was telling her that if she has the adequate skills and the drive to deliver, she can be anywhere she want, but not now, and then I offered her a part time or full time freelance position that she can really learn up a lot under my supervision and deliver with satisfaction. She's not budging.
It also made me thought of myself on why I'm always hesitant to get out of Malaysia and just start a new career along with my peers overseas. I honestly want to get out of here. Seriously. I could have just gone out there. Do you know how much that I envied people who went out and had a good life being employed elsewhere?
But I still haven't been satisfied with myself, of not being able to deliver the best that I can, the best of my work throughout the 7 years of my career, and I intend to stay and prove that I can produce something great and potentially have really good gains before I make my ultimate move. I still have work to do. Unfinished business.
There are several more things that I need to cover such as server deployment on AWS, doing DevOps for web backend apps, and more architecting work. It takes time to learn. That's why I want to delegate some Android work to that young fella, so that I can move on to the more hardcore stuff. -
I try to wake up early, do some productive things, try my hands on different stuffs in life, learn a new skill, switch to a new career field, become famous and change the world... but these damned bug fixes make me stay up at nights and so goes the cycle of my life.😑
-
Okay so there are a lot of things that are left by us students as "this would be taught to us on job, why bother now?" So i have many questions regarding this:
- is it a safe mentality? I mean University is teaching me, say a,b,c and the job is supposed to be like writing full letters, than am i stupid to stick to just a,b,c and not learning how to write letters beforehand?
- what is even "taught" on job? This is especially directed towards people in Big firms. I mean i can always blame that small ugly startup who treated me badly and not gave me any resources, but why do i feel its going to be same at every other company?
I guess no one is gonna teach me for 6 months on how to write classes with java, or make a ml engineer out of me when i don't know jack shit about ml.... That's the task for college, right?
I feel that when these companies say they "teach", you they mean how to follow instructions regarding agile meetings, how to survive office politics and how to learn quickly and produce an output quickly. I don't think that if i don't know how MVI works, then they are gonna teach me that, would they?i guess not unless they already have someone knowledgeable in that topic
- what about the things that are not taught in our colleges and we wanna make a career in it? Like say Android. From what i have experienced , choosing a career in a subject that's not taught you in grad school immediately takes away some kind of shield from you, as you are expected to know everything beforehand. So again, the same questions bfrom above
i did learned something from job life tho, and that too twice. Once it was when i first encountered an app sample for mvvm and once when i found out a very specific case of how video player is being used in a manner that handled a lot of bugs.
Why i didn't knew those approaches when i was not in job? Well, the first was a theoretical model whose practical implementation was difficult to find online that time and the second was a thing that i myself gave a lot of hours, yet failed to understand. However when i was in the company , i was partnered with a senior dev who himself had once spent 30 days with the source code to find a similar solution.
So again , both of above things could have been done by me had i spent more time trying to learn those "professional tools" and/or dwelve deeper into the tech. And i did felt pretty guilty not knowing about those...5 -
Don't work with time, work with target, my father taught me that. It seems similar to don't stop when you are tired but when you are done!!!
Well that helped me when I started my dev career but over the years I had to be wise how I apply the rule so I don't have assholes sucking life out of me in disguise.1 -
I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?
Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?10 -
When you spent your whole life hoping to go to college for a degree to start a development career.
Then, when you finally graduate after 4 years off and on, graduate into the beginning pandemic fearing economy and be unable to find a job for over 9 months.
Eventually, working on the family farm to stay productive but then feeling unable to leave after the job market finally comes back.
Anyone else?2 -
Critical Tips to Learn Programming Faster Sample:
Be comfortable with basics
The mistake which many aspiring students make is to start in a rush and skip the basics of programming and its fundamentals. They tend to start from the comparatively advanced topics.
This tends to work in many sectors and fields of Technology, but in the world of programming, having a deep knowledge of the basic principles of coding and programming is a must. If you are taking a class through a tutor and you feel that they are going too fast for your understanding, you need to be firm and clear and tell them to go slowly, so that you can also be on the same page like everyone else
Most often than not, many people tend to struggle when they reach a higher level with a feeling of getting lost, then they feel the need to fall back and go through basics, which is time-consuming. Learning basics well is the key to be fast and accurate in programming.
Practice to code by hand.
This may sound strange to some of you. Why write a code by hand when the actual work is supposed to be done on a computer? There are some reasons for this.
One reason being, when you were to be called for an interview for a programming job, the technical evaluation will include a hand-coding round to assess your programming skills. It makes sense as experts have researched and found that coding by hand is the best way to learn how to program.
Be brave and fiddle with codes
Most of us try to stick to the line of instructions given to us by our seniors, but it is extremely important to think out of the box and fiddle around with codes. That way, you will learn how the results get altered with the changes in the code.
Don't be over-ambitious and change the whole code. It takes experience to reach that level. This will give you enormous confidence in your skillset
Reach out for guidance
Seeking help from professionals is never looked down upon. Your fellow mates will likely not feel a hitch while sharing their knowledge with you. They also have been in your position at some point in their career and help will be forthcoming.
You may need professional help in understanding the program, bugs in the program and how to debug it. Sometimes other people can identify the bug instantly, which may have escaped your attention. Don't be shy and think that they'll make of you. It's always a team effort. Be comfortable around your colleagues.
Don’t Burn-out
You must have seen people burning the midnight oil and not coming to a conclusion, hence being reported by the testing team or the client.
These are common occurrences in the IT Industry. It is really important to conserve energy and take regular breaks while learning or working. It improves concentration and may help you see solutions faster. It's a proven fact that taking a break while working helps with better results and productivity. To be a better programmer, you need to be well rested and have an active mind.
Go Online
It's a common misconception that learning how to program will take a lot of money, which is not true. There are plenty of online college courses designed for beginner students and programmers. Many free courses are also available online to help you become a better programmer. Websites like Udemy and programming hub is beneficial if you want to improve your skills.
There are free courses available for everything from [HTML](https://bitdegree.org/learn/...) to CSS. You can use these free courses to get a piece of good basic knowledge. After cementing your skills, you can go for complex paid courses.
Read Relevant Material
One should never stop acquiring knowledge. This could be an extension of the last point, but it is in a different context. The idea is to boost your knowledge about the domain you're working on.
In real-life situations, the client for which you're writing a program for possesses complete knowledge of their business, how it works, but they don't know how to write a code for some specific program and vice versa.
So, it is crucial to keep yourself updated about the recent trends and advancements. It is beneficial to know about the business for which you're working. Read relevant material online, read books and articles to keep yourself up-to-date.
Never stop practicing
The saying “practice makes perfect” holds no matter what profession you are in. One should never stop practicing, it's a path to success. In programming, it gets even more critical to practice, since your exposure to programming starts with books and courses you take. Real work is done hands-on, you must spend time writing codes by hand and practicing them on your system to get familiar with the interface and workflow.
Search for mock projects online or make your model projects to practice coding and attentively commit to it. Things will start to come in the structure after some time.4 -
I initially thought I wanted to go to college for video editing, then I changed my mind and wanted to go into graphic design. Those didn't work out and I began contemplating what I could do with my life. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I could make a career out of the hobby I had since the age of 13. Never even considered it before that moment.
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First month at my first dev job and I already don’t know if this is what I want. My boss keeps touching the code without me even being present, so when I arrive I don’t know what’s even happening. Getting texts from him at 4am doesn’t sound very healthy either. Is it all the same? Are dev people supposed to not have a life and work 24/7 for a company? Maybe I’m just wrong about my career choice. But I used to love coding before the job. Now it’s just a fucked up thing where I wake up wishing my boss didn’t text me or refactored half of the code in one stand.1
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Liferant. I feel annoyed If I compare my efforts to efforts of my "friends". I put 500% more in my self education, my career and professional life and I earn just a tiny bit more. I don't even know if I have friends anymore. We do not have a single thing common. While I want to develop, learn something, build something useful for people, they only want to drink, going out etc. Before we had some lan parties some game night but it was long ago. I lost any interest in travel and parties. I don't enjoy alcohol, I still consume it when I'm with them because there nothing else to do. I also become vegan about 2.5 years ago and those bbq`s are just pain in the ass. Plus I heard the sentence "show me your friends and I tell you your life" - uff.. I had never a single person who I knew personally and who has similar mindset like I do. Shall I start to look for friends? Even the thought feels kind of pathetic to me. I'm a freaking island in middle of the society who is trying to make it better but it's fighting against it with full force. I'm tired. I'm not suicidal and I still enjoy the life, but I'm crazy alone in what I like to do.2
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Software development process
0:I can't fix this
1:Crisis of confidence
2:Questions career
3:Questions life
4:Oh fuck it was a typo ,chill :3 -
(Asking for someone I’ve been mentoring.)
TLDR; Looking for recommended resources on how to code email templates from scratch.
I’ve been helping a friend transition their career from sales to web development and recently he applied for a position as a jr developer for an ecommerce startup. They liked him and they’re willing to create a new position for him where he’ll work with both the marketing department and the development team. He’ll start with building email templates for the marketing department and eventually move on to development as he grows his skills. I’d really appreciate it if I could get some recommended resources for learning how to code email templates from scratch and from PSDs. This would be a life changer for him and I’m trying to do as much as I can to help me out.4 -
Let's be honest - given the state of the world today, the more I listen to Megadeth, the more I relate to what Dave Mustaine has been pissed off about for a few decades now. Oh, you don't know who Dave Mustain is? He was, like, the 5th guy in Metallica. Rather, he was the bass player until he got fucked over because he was a dick and thrown off the first album Metallica did. Don't worry - he did OK. He formed Megadeth and still had quite a successful musical career. Why am I ranting about him? Simple - A lot of his lyrics are darker than Metallica's. I honestly don't know what the fuck I'm doing with my software/personal/professional life right now. I've got ideas & dreams, but all this COVID shit is just draining the fuck out of me. Sometimes I feel like I've failed - most of the lifeforms on this planet manage to procreate. Well, that didn't happen for me. On the down side, I didn't get to be a father. On the up side, I didn't punish the life of a child with my own brands of mistakes, ignorance, and stupidity. My life is littered with male failures. My biological father (paranoid, schizophrenic ) died at 58, doing everyone around him a favor. My grandfather on my mother's side died of colon cancer at 69 (so-called reformed alcoholic, manic depressive on lithium with great abusive tendencies). My step father who adopted me? Sure - he loved me. He just never understood me. "Computers are just a tool". Fuck you, 'dad'. Go play with your horses and tell me what I'm doing isn't meaningful. Where was I? Oh yes, almost killing myself last summer. I think between COVID and my own colossal screw ups & paranoia I went over the entire fucking edge. I pulled myself out of it with the help of medication, counseling, and learning to just let shit blow up because "it's not my problem". I'm still angry. Perhaps that's the only thing that keeps me going from time to time. I'll leave you with a quote from Ghandi - No, not that idealistic, limited one, Mahatma Ghandi. From his grandson, who managed to really pick up what he was putting down - Arun Ghandi:
“Use your anger for good. Anger to people is like gas to the automobile - it fuels you to move forward and get to a better place. Without it, we would not be motivated to rise to a challenge. It is an energy that compels us to define what is just and unjust.” -
I definitely want to program/code for my career, creating things and solving problems is cool, but I just started doing game development and IT'S SO COOL. I may have messed up my plans for my life :/
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So I am a fresher and have worked a lot in coding and good at full stack and reactjs.
This situation of due to covid got me into high pressure and
Rn I took a job in non department that too in sales.
I really need a job/ internship in technical so that my career gets secure.
Just 4 days back I was super confident and excited about upcoming life.. and today
Anyways.. I think this is gonna bring the best out of me and am gonna proove that am super talented and can do anything I want including getting a good job in this market :))
Wish me luck and ofcc
I would be greatful if I get wise advice on the same <3 -
I think the biggest bullshit about work life and beginning of a career is that at the start of your new job, colleagues and employers keep telling you that everything's gonna be fine and that things come with time and you'll learn and grow as you go on.
Not true. If you just cruise along and you don't maintain your skills, sooner or later they're going to ask you to do something you don't have the skills for, you won't be able to do it or anything remotely like it because you don't have the know-how and the result is: you get fired. I should know because I've never once not been fired; I'm up to 5 jobs now. lol
There is almost no greater example that demonstrates humans are liars.6 -
I’ve met some of the best friends I could ever hope to have thanks to code.
I started with the MUGEN fighting game engine back in high school. Didn’t know a thing about code but I wanted to learn so I could make awesome characters.
If it were not for that, I would’ve never met friends from all over the world from different countries, cultures, and backgrounds. I certainly never expected to have a best friend who lived in Mexico (who is now in Japan). I would’ve never found the career I have today, nor would I have met the love of my life (even if I couldn’t have her, my love is still there), and I wouldn’t have traveled the world to meet some of these friends.
In the end, it was the engine, our passion for fighting games, and our discovery of the art of code that brought us all together. -
Desperately need advice from devs in India...
asking this here since really stressed about this and don't know who to ask to...
I am an engineering student from Bangalore, India from a basically no name college...
I have been coding for 2 years now, web stuff, primarily rails and js...
i have worked with handful of startups, done internships, and am working on my own projects which i will launch soon...
Lately my college has made it a mission to make my life hell even though i always perform well academically...it has gotten to a point where I am not able to work or learn anymore...
I wanted to ask what consequence my career will face if I drop out ?
I believe lack of a graduation degree will make me not eligible for many jobs...please suggest what I should do...6 -
Hey all! I'm gonna be graduating soon from grad school and I'm starting to realize that I have no idea what I wanna do with my programming career!
I currently work as QA but have been really working towards being a programmer but the only problem is that I really dislike web applications ... specifically front end.
With most jobs being full stack web apps, I feel like I'm really gonna be limiting myself once I'm applying for junior software engineering jobs.
I'm just wanting your thoughts and some advice on what I should do since in still trying to figure things out. The only goal I have in life for my career at the moment is to be a software engineer.5 -
i wanted some advice on career progression. I am a CS graduate from 2020, have been a decent mobile dev for last 3 years and switched 2 companies so far. i currently have an average ctc (considering i reside in the world's most populated country) as a junior dev.
i want to grow but don't know the next steps. here are my options:
1. stay in the same company . role growth: senior in 2 years , more senior in 4 years . comp growth : avg 10% every year
>> this feels okay-ish path but 10% growth seems very less
2. switch every x years . role growth : unpredictable. comp growth min 30-50%
>> this has been my approach. as i grow bore of a company, i switch . the first time i got a 200% hike, but at that time, i was already earning very less. however companies do not usually take you for a senior role unles you were a senior before, so i think i am losing something here
3. do a masters in tech . comp growth : ? role growth :0
>> this is an unknown territory for me. i haven't heard of anyone bragging about how they did a masters in some tech field and got a better job/position. most people prefer masters in business or do a masters in tech only if they had a poor bachelors degree
4. do a masters in business. comp growth ? role growth?
>> another unknown territory for me. i really wanna consider a managerial position, just because i want to be leading the action , but that's probably because of being a beta guy in all my life and not just the tech/work.
1. managers have a great comp but they also get fired more often than techies. how do you become a good manager/vp/director etc?
2. what are your goals, how do you improve/work upon the goals as a manager?
3. how do you grow as a manager?
honestly i put a lot of tasks and capabilities into one category : the skills of a manager. but i think there might be different roles for such categories. let me know which one is which and if they are worth going into:
1. an x is a person that researches on market trends, other companies, amtheir audience etc and come up with new ideas to implement and improve growth/business of the company
2. an x is a person that makes sure that devs , qa, designers etc are aligned , knows what to do , clears their doubts and ensure the proper functioni5 of the team and timely releases of new features.
3. an x is an ambitious and curious person who can think of new , original ideas.
4. an x is a person with all knowledge of product features.
-----
in all above statements, is x== junior manager? then what are senior manager, vp, directors, president, tech lead, qa,etc?
also how can one start to become x?6 -
Need advice about switching to contracting.
TL;DR;
So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.
Now the full story:
Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.
Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.
Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.
Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.
So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.
Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.
Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!3 -
How to handle a "Mr/Mrs -KNOW-IT-ALL " or The "I know everything and anything" kind of person in a work place ?5
-
god i need more money... sigh and the whole 'oh he wants his own money too' yeah no shit.
motherfucking economic downturn, motherfucking stupid ruffneck baby touching garbage! fucking bitchy resentful stupid, retarded, ugly, bottom of the shallow side of the gene pool motherfuckers !
and their stupid whore young adult offspring !
and you know what reallllly gets me ?
my expectations from life, have yes fluctuated, but they were never really that inflated.
no shoveling shit
nothing that destroys me
everything that inflates my health and prolongs my life, youthfullness, libido, and frees me of toxic creatures pretending that everyone else is toxic because they're soulless meddling trifling underhanded backstabbing sadistic hateful trash !
and you know, a career in something i would consider meaningful would have been nice, but i'm fine with extra money, a woman and a place to live that i'll never have to worry about losing and people butting the fuck out of my affairs when their private lives are horrific to the extreme !7 -
!dev
!!Lyrics
Really a random post but related to my personal dev-life so maybe it’s at least arguable if it belongs here.
This is one of my all time favorite songs, I can identify myself with it (although I’m reinterpreting some parts).
Back in Highschool I had girlfriends, I had time, I had my entourage, everything except money. All my dad wanted me to become was a rich fucking millionaire. Failure was never accepted, no matter what it was about and everything could always have been done better.
It was pretty much a military childhood. I already loved programming back then but only as a hobby, kinda.
I really wanted to make good money so I started a dev career (with makes gooooood money where I came from). The more I invested in my career, and that was a lot, I more and more lost the understanding of what’s really important, just pursued my goal of being the best fucking dev out there and start my own company in the next 10 years.
Well.. 10 years are over now, I’m still an engineer and I lost everything I had before I started this. Especially friends and relations to women (which I’m not even able to connect to anymore).
In this lyric, the blackbird and raven are the career that just ate me alive. Hope that makes any sense to some of you?..
Anyway, here the lyrics if you wanna read it:
—————————————-
Sons of Anarchy
Come join the murder - white buffalo
There's a blackbird perched outside my window
I hear him calling
I hear him sing
He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers
He sees all my sins
He reads my soul
One day that bird, he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
On a blanket made of woven shadows
Flew up to heaven
On a raven's glide
His angels they turn my wings to wax now
I fell like judas, grace denied
On that day that he lied to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
I walk among the children of my fathers
The broken wings, betrayal's cost
They call to me but never touch my heart, now
I am too far
I'm too lost
All I can hear is what he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
So now I curse that raven's fire
You made me hate, you made me burn
He laughed aloud as he flew from eden
You always knew, you never learn
The crow no longer sings to me
Like Martin Luther
Or Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king3 -
So idk how to start this but ... ohm the short version would be that I'm in a little life crisis because idk where my career should go, i know the basics (maybe a bit more) about it security, i know how to setup a nodeJs server from scratch, i know frontend dev. , swift, kotlin, java, C , R and a lot of useless frameworks but nothing of this I'm really good in (what's ok because im in my 3 semester) i just don't know where i should go.
I seriously love every aspect of computer science but i also know it make no sense for my future not to focus on one suspect.
Now how can i find out with way i want to go ?1 -
Good Morning Hustlers !!!
hope you all are enjoying your work life, so can you guys guide me as I am going to take admission in college and I want to learn a lot of things but kinda confused, can you guys suggest to me how to start my career in BTech and what skills should I focus on.5 -
tests boy
- balding in his late twenties
- thinks that React is a framework
- favorite book is either 1984 or fight club
- came to IT to make an impact but obviously lacks determination to do so. Prefers not to think about it
- doesn’t know why and for what he wakes up every morning. Stopped thinking about it 7 years ago
- has a girlfriend that doesn’t allow him to penetrate her, only hugs and cunnilingus
- already forgot how does a blowjob feel like
- when it’s too hot in his room when he tries to sleep, he gets up and opens the window, and after that he doesn’t want to sleep anymore, and tomorrow is a yet another working day
- unexpected slack message sound he hears when not at the office triggers his fight or flight response
- still salty about CSS vertical-align: middle not instantly centering the element vertically
- just like 5 years ago, every day he thinks that after he learns That New Thing, he’ll begin The Real Life, and his current career state is temporary
- loves to say “it’s not my job” but only says that if absolutely sure that he won’t be reported for that
- uses vscode
- thinks he’s an engineer1